Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Transaction Cost Plummets by 79%
An open coding contest has led to significant progress in making Bitcoin transactions more quantum-safe. The Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge, run by StarkWare and its partners, aimed to reduce the estimated cost of building a quantum-safe transaction using GPU compute.
The initial estimate was around $320, but after one week of intense competition among developers who used AI models to speed up their code, the figure dropped to about $66. This represents an impressive 79% reduction in the estimated cost.
The contest focused on optimizing the GPU code behind Quantum-Safe Bitcoin (QSB), a method developed by Avihu Levy that adds hash-based protection to bitcoin spends without altering the network's rules. The first QSB transaction was mined in August after approximately 3,100 GPU-hours of work.