Bitcoin Forum

Hey .. I want to know what is xPub .. And how it helps to increase the privacy??

An xpub is an extended public key used for BIP32 deterministic wallets. It does not increase privacy, in fact, giving out your master public key (usually what is considered the xpub) reveals all the addresses in your wallet.

whats the BIP32 ddeterministic??

BIP 32 is a specification for Hierarchical Deterministic wallets (wallets that always generate the same keys given the same root). You can read the spec here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawiki

A BIP32 hierarchical deterministic wallet does not provide any extra security. How it works is basically a special private key that acts as a seed for an infinite series of addresses. So if you send bitcoin to any one of the addresses, you will receive it. This is compared to a normal private key setup, where you have one for each address.

The downside of this is that if someone knows your extended public key (xPub), they can generate a list of all the addresses you own and thus compromise your privacy.

Is there any form of preventing that from happening? Is there any way someone can see your xPub?

You can't derive that from the blockexplorers or anywhere. You can only derive it using the seed or xpriv. As long as you keep both of them safe, there is no reason why anyone else can get them.