Bitcoin’s ‘last resort’ quantum-safe solution just got 79% cheaper: StarkWare
StarkWare says the estimated compute cost for preparing a quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction has dropped to about $66 from roughly $320 after a week of optimization. The improvement came from the Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge, where participants found 62 accepted ways to speed up two computation tasks needed to build the transaction, cutting benchmarked GPU costs by about 79%. The Quantum-Safe Bitcoin design adds hash-based protection against quantum attacks without changing Bitcoin’s consensus rules, making it an emergency, last-resort defense rather than a full solution. The first mainnet QSB transaction was confirmed on Aug. 26. StarkWare still считает a soft fork the better long-term path for broad quantum protection.
