Bitcoin Silent Payments Require ~8MB Daily Mobile Scan Data

Bitcoin (BTC) mobile scan data required for silent payments has been estimated at around 8.0MB per day based on recent block intervals. However, if remote servers omit certain transaction-specific data, wallets may fail to locate deposit records even after synchronization completes.

CryptoSlate analyzed 255,434 Bitcoin blocks as of May 15, estimating BlindBit Oracle v2's full scan feed requires approximately 8.0MB daily data. This represents the average for a recent period with 144 blocks per day, differing from initial full blockchain download requirements.

Silent payments are designed so users can publicly share a single address while each transaction generates a new taproot address. Senders create destinations using recipient's public information, and recipients' wallets find matching outputs by combining transaction input data with scan keys. BIP-352 explains this method reduces on-chain transaction linking from address reuse.

However, light clients that don't process the blockchain directly require servers to provide 'tweak' data for each transaction. If a server omits specific tweaks, wallets may not detect valid deposits even after synchronization completes, though the outputs remain recorded on the blockchain. The measurement period covered blocks 709,656 through 965,089.

Total BlindBit v2 scan data amounted to approximately 15.08GB (1,507,994,6729 bytes) over the period with an average of 59.0KB per block. The daily 8.0MB estimate is based on recent averages rather than total recovery requirements.

Proposed data reduction methods include combining taproot-specific filters with raw tweaks, which could reduce cumulative data to approximately 7.14GB but would require additional block downloads depending on wallet activity and false positive rates. Filter calculations showed less than 0.5% error compared to actual filter encodings, though deployment status remains unconfirmed.

Complete verification requires multiple servers to publicly commit to tweak sets for each block and compare them. BIP-352 index server draft specifications present various structures including self-hosted nodes or remote scanners but remain work-in-progress. Implementation has expanded in some wallets: Sparrow Wallet 2.5.0 added silent payment reception and hardware wallet support, while Frigate automatically selects relevant public Electrum servers.

BlindBit Oracle v2 provides indexing services for silent payments via HTTP and gRPC APIs. However, development documentation classifies Frigate as an experimental Electrum server with ongoing light client specifications. Past issues with Cake Wallet showed wallets might not request missing blocks even after switching servers if they stored higher scan heights.

While recorded cases exist where re-scanning from earlier blocks revealed missed silent payment deposits, no separate operator replication of the current measurement was confirmed. Therefore, both 15.08GB and daily 8.0MB figures should be viewed as single measurement results pending further validation of mobile wallet receipt stability through data volume and missing detection/re-scan mechanisms.