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I've seen the term stealth address being used for both:

  1. Monero standard address
  2. One-time public key

I'm guilty of using the term for 2. initially, but later I realized that it may actually refer to 1. and went on to correct some of my posts here.

Moneropedia definition hints to 1. (emphasis mine):

Stealth addresses are an important part of Monero's inherent privacy. They allow and require the sender to create random one-time addresses for every transaction on behalf of the recipient. The recipient can publish just one address, yet have all of his/her incoming payments go to unique addresses on the blockchain, where they cannot be linked back to either the recipient's published address or any other transactions' addresses. By using stealth addresses, only the sender and receiver can determine where a payment was sent.

So, which is it? I figure any Monero address is a stealth address. It could also refer to the stealth address scheme, describing the overall process, or it could refer to the individual one-time public key.

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2 Answers 2

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If we look how the term "stealth address" is used outside of Monero, for example in bitcoin ecosystem:

The concept was invented Peter Todd based on earlier work by ByteCoin, and with feedback from other developers. It’s a powerful tool for allowing one to accept Bitcoins using a public Bitcoin address while preventing passive observers from knowing your transaction history.

or:

Stealth address means that for an external observer of the blockchain is not possible to identify what payments were made to you, because your address is not recorded in blockchain.

So in my opinion, correct is stealth address = "Monero standard address" ie your point 1. I would also say it is OK to use the term to describing the overall process.

Sources:

  1. https://www.codeproject.com/articles/775226/nbitcoin-cryptography-part (This is actually very good explanation of the principles how stealth address works. It uses different terminology than is used in Monero e.g. "ephemeral key" but principles are same)
  2. http://sx.dyne.org/stealth.html
  3. https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/20701/what-is-a-stealth-address
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For more details about how stealth addresses are generated take a look at my explanation video or git repo

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