Bitcoin's Quantum Defense Just Got a Whole Lot Cheaper
The cost of preparing a quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction has plummeted by 79% after optimization efforts led by StarkWare. The estimated computational cost to prepare such a transaction now stands at $66, down from an initial $320 on August 26th.
This significant reduction comes as participants in the Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge found ways to push down GPU computation needed for building quantum-safe transactions.
The challenge, launched by StarkWare, Yukon Research, and Eigen Labs on September 16th, invited developers and researchers to make transaction-building software faster and more efficient. The optimization efforts resulted in 62 accepted improvements across two computational tasks, leading to the substantial cost reduction.
StarkWare described this development as a 'last resort' measure for protecting against future quantum attacks, which could potentially break Bitcoin's elliptic-curve digital signatures. Researchers are working on various solutions, including Quantum-Safe Bitcoin (QSB), but StarkWare still favors a soft fork, a change to Bitcoin's consensus rules, as a better long-term solution.