Paynym/Bip47 (reusable payment codes) are a stealth address of sorts, allowing people to publicly share an address without observers being able to trace it’s balance & transaction history on chain.
2/ between this & #Monero’s one-time stealth addresses, which are just one part of Monero privacy.
Let’s examine the difference between Paynyms ( when used in addition to Whirlpool and post mix spending tools) and Monero’s default privacy to understand why they are different;
3/ @SamouraiWallet Whirpool does a good job breaking deterministic links between inputs and outputs, providing a reasonable degree of privacy on a transparent chain; So one could draw another (rough) parallel between their implementation of Chaumian CoinJoin and Ring Signatures.
4/ Arguably Monero’s strongest privacy feature is Confidential Transactions which cryptographically hide tx amounts and (imo) make Monero fungible; By comparison Samourai has a suite of post mix spend tools including collaborative transactions (named cahoots) such as #Stonewall,
5/ #StonewallX2 and #Stowaway. In StonewallX2, two users share their combined UTXO set to pay a third user; And in Stowaway, Alice and Bob combine UTXOs in a payment from Alice to Bob; Stowaway has the added benefit of being indistinguishable from regular BTC txs! These clever
6/ tools obfuscate the ownership of inputs being spent within those txs and in doing so, they break certain heuristics/assumptions made by blockchain analysts which is great! However, privacy guarantees provided by these tools are inferior to completely hidden amounts (Ring CT).
7/ By default, Monero nodes broadcast txs using #Dandelion++ which helps obfuscate IP addresses; many Moneristos also run nodes via Tor/I2p; and Samourai also supports Tor.
8/8 In conclusion, Paynym is not #Monero in #Bitcoin and I feel it’s important to outline the nuance and differences as some may take this statement at face value.
However, it’s great that #Monero is inspiring #Bitcoin users to build stronger privacy tools for users.
@SamouraiDev also gave interesting thoughts on this as well: