Bitcoin's Quantum Attack Deadline Just Got Closer

Researchers at Eigen Labs made significant progress in optimizing the resource score of a crucial part of a quantum attack against Bitcoin, reducing it by 86.1%. The breakthrough, known as ECDSA.Fail, improves the efficiency of elliptic-curve arithmetic, but does not provide a means to hack or recover private keys.

The main concern is that this advancement shortens the time available for Bitcoin and other blockchains to transition to post-quantum security. Currently, approximately 30% of the total BTC supply (6.04 million coins) is at risk of a quantum attack due to publicly available public keys.

BIP 360 introduces a new type of output called Pay-to-Merkle-Root that protects coins whose public keys are visible for extended periods. However, this patch does not address the quantum risk existing during transaction processing in the mempool. StarkWare has demonstrated a quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction on mainnet using a nonstandard miner-direct route and off-chain GPU work.