Quantum-safe Bitcoin compute cost falls 79% to under $67

Participants in the Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge cut the estimated GPU cost of preparing a quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction to under $67. StarkWare said the reduction was about 79% based on benchmark tests. The dashboard now shows an estimated cost of $66. The estimate fell from roughly $320 spent on the first such mainnet transaction in August. Preparing that transaction required approximately 3,100 GPU-hours across roughly 100 GPUs. The estimate excluded Bitcoin network fees. StarkWare, Yukon Research and Eigen Labs launched the challenge on Sept. 16. The challenge invited developers, researchers and AI agents to improve the transaction-building software. StarkWare said the challenge produced 62 accepted improvements across two computational tasks. The latest optimizations have only been demonstrated in benchmark tests. QSB does not require changes to Bitcoin's consensus rules. StarkWare researcher Avihu Levy published the QSB design in April. The design uses hash-based protection against quantum attacks. Levy described QSB as a last-resort measure because of its costs, complexity and limited applicability. The first QSB transaction was mined and confirmed on Aug. 26. Tomer Giladi provided engineering work for that transaction. The transaction was submitted directly through MARA's Slipstream service. StarkWare said a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could break the elliptic-curve digital signatures used by Bitcoin. Attackers could potentially steal coins whose public keys are exposed. StarkWare favors a soft fork as the long-term answer for broad quantum protection on Bitcoin.