Overview
- Avihu Levy of StarkWare published Quantum Safe Bitcoin on Thursday, a method that makes new transactions resistant to quantum attacks without changing Bitcoin’s rules.
- QSB swaps fragile elliptic‑curve signatures for a hash‑to‑signature puzzle, forcing the sender to brute‑force a hash that looks like a valid signature to thwart Shor‑style attacks.
- Each QSB transaction requires heavy GPU work that Levy estimates at about $75 to $200, and the non‑standard format likely needs direct miner submission and does not work with Lightning.
- Olaoluwa Osuntokun of Lightning Labs released a zk‑STARK prototype that proves a wallet’s seed created a given public key, letting owners recover Taproot funds if an emergency soft fork disables normal key‑spends; a proof takes about 50 seconds and is roughly 1.7 MB.
- Urgency grew after Google researchers tightened quantum attack estimates, with millions of BTC already tied to exposed public keys, while longer‑term fixes like BIP‑360 remain uncertain and will require audits, tooling, and governance to deploy.