Even Silent Payments (which are better to have than not) do not provide a single privacy guarantee on Bitcoin. They only defer the date by which your privacy will be busted. If I send money to a SP address, I cannot guarantee that my privacy will be maintained because the recipient can choose to violate it, because Bitcoin does not provide shielding to the sender (in contrast to Monero). If you are targeted by the government and raided, when your SP private key is seized they will have a perfect record of everyone’s transactions. You can also accidentally invalidate privacy with SP for both sender and recipient by combining UTXOs. Silent Payments, to actually facilitate privacy, require you to never KYC at an exchange and *never* combine UTXOs. Normal people are not going to be using coin control on every transaction. Imagine telling a normal person “you’re using it wrong! You can’t combine UTXOs when you spend your money, and you can’t send multiple UTXOs to your exchange separately either! You’re piercing the privacy veil!” Any reasonable person would conclude that privacy on Bitcoin is a big fucking joke. It’s ridiculous.

I don't think that's really what silent payments are used for though. It's not an on chain privacy thing. It's a way to have a static address without having address reuse. That's all I see it being used for in practice. And that's for all the reasons you state; it's not a privacy tool IMHO.

silent payments, yes. I was away for a time but am back.