StarkWare Cuts Quantum-Secure Bitcoin Transaction Cost by 79% in One Week

StarkWare's Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge has seen significant progress in just one week, reducing the estimated cost of preparing a quantum-secure Bitcoin transaction by 79%. Initially estimated to be around $320, the cost dropped to approximately $67 after participants' efforts. The challenge, which offers a $20,000 prize pool, focuses on optimizing GPU computations for grinding, a process that involves iterating through numerous possibilities until a suitable candidate for QSB is found.

The challenge has been ongoing since September 16, with developers, researchers, and AI agents working together to reduce the computational costs. The original search code was developed using AI, but now the task has been opened up to the broader community to see how far the costs can be reduced through automated optimization.

While QSB remains a fallback mechanism rather than a full-fledged security upgrade for Bitcoin, it protects a specific transaction structure using hash functions and allows coins to be moved to a quantum-attack-resistant output without protocol changes. However, it does not protect Bitcoin as a whole and currently uses a non-standard transaction format that requires direct miner transmission.