Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Transactions Need No Protocol Upgrade

Quantum Safe Bitcoin not practical for everyday use

The proposal comes with caveats. It costs the sender between $75 and $150 per transaction in GPU compute and is more complex than a typical Bitcoin transaction, and thus would only make sense for securing large BTC transactions.

“This is huge,” said StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson, claiming that it essentially makes Bitcoin quantum-safe today.

Still, Bitcoin ESG specialist Daniel Batten said it was “an overstatement” because exposed public keys and dormant wallets are “not addressed in the paper.”

Batten was referring to an estimated 1.7 million BTC locked in early P2PK addresses that could be cracked by a quantum computer.

Its existence has led to fierce debate about what to do with the dormant coins, with the community split between leaving Bitcoin as-is to preserve its core ethos, freezing or burning the vulnerable coins entirely or upgrading the protocol to support quantum-safe signatures.

Protocol changes are the preferred solution

The researchers acknowledged that this is a last-resort measure as transactions are non-standard, costs dont scale to all users and use cases like Lightning Network are not covered.

They concluded that protocol-level changes remain the preferred long-term path.

“While this article describes a solution that works today for quantum-safe Bitcoin transactions, it should be treated as a last-resort measure.”

Google published a paper in March that unsettled the Bitcoin community as it suggested that a quantum computer could potentially crack Bitcoins cryptography using far fewer resources than previously thought.

Meanwhile, Lightning Labs chief technology officer Olaoluwa Osuntokun on Wednesday published a quantum “escape hatch” prototype that enables users to prove Bitcoin wallet ownership from the original seed phrase without revealing it, which could serve as an alternative Bitcoin authorization method.