Estimated Cost to Prepare Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Transaction Falls 79%

The estimated computing cost of preparing an experimental Quantum-Safe Bitcoin transaction has fallen 79% to $66, reducing the resources needed to test a potential defense against quantum attacks on Bitcoin (BTC).

The estimate dropped from about $320 for the first Quantum-Safe Bitcoin transaction, which was mined and confirmed Aug. 26. Preparing that transaction required about 3,100 GPU-hours across roughly 100 GPUs, excluding Bitcoin network fees.

The reduction followed a weeklong optimization challenge launched Sept. 16 by StarkWare, Yukon Research and Eigen Labs. The challenge invited developers, researchers and artificial intelligence agents to improve the software used to prepare a QSB transaction.

The effort produced 62 accepted improvements across two computational tasks. The latest $66 figure is based on benchmark tests rather than a new confirmed transaction.

Quantum-Safe Bitcoin (QSB) is a design published by StarkWare researcher Avihu Levy in April. It uses hash-based protection against quantum attacks without changing Bitcoin’s consensus rules.

Levy described QSB as a last-resort measure because of its cost, complexity and limited applicability. A soft fork, which would change Bitcoin’s consensus rules, remains the longer-term approach for broader protection against quantum threats.