StarkWare Challenge Lowers Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Compute Cost Estimate by 79%
Compute costs drop for experimental Bitcoin security
An AI-assisted coding challenge run by StarkWare, Yukon Research, and Eigen Labs has lowered the estimated cost to prepare an experimental Quantum-Safe Bitcoin (QSB) transaction. As of September 26, the dashboard lists the estimate at about $63, down from roughly $320.
The competition focuses on reducing the off-chain computational work required to prepare these transactions. It does not reduce the fees paid to the Bitcoin network. The project aims to create a fallback method against potential future attacks from quantum computers.
Key figures from the contest
- The initial estimate for preparing a QSB transaction was around $320, based on 3,100 GPU-hours.
- After one week, StarkWare reported a 79% reduction, estimating costs at $67 in GPU compute.
- Subsequent improvements on the dashboard have lowered the figure further to approximately $63.
- The calculation models a fleet of 100 RTX 3090 graphics processing units (GPUs), which are specialized chips used for heavy computing tasks.
- 62 verified improvements were recorded across two tracks: transaction pinning and subset selection.
How the cost reduction was achieved
The challenge targets "grinding," a process where code repeatedly performs public-key recovery and hashing to find a valid solution. Participants optimize code for two specific tasks. Transaction pinning binds a transaction to its contents, while subset selection creates an identifier secured by a hash-based one-time signature.
Benchmarks are run on high-end RTX 4090 GPUs and measured over 15 to 20 minutes. The system independently reconstructs reported results on a standard central processing unit (CPU) to verify accuracy. The dollar estimate is a projection based on these speedups applied to previous spending data, not a bill for a completed transaction.
Limits of the current approach
Despite the lower cost estimate, significant hurdles remain. StarkWare notes that this method does not protect Bitcoin holdings where the public key has already been exposed. Additionally, QSB transactions are considered nonstandard by the Bitcoin network.
Because they are nonstandard, these transactions cannot be sent through regular nodes. They require direct submission to a miner to be included in a block. The method also presents a complex user experience and does not currently support Lightning Network channels.
Long-term goals versus current reality
The research paper behind QSB describes a construction using hash functions and one-time signatures to stay secure even if quantum computers break standard Bitcoin encryption. However, StarkWare continues to prefer a soft fork—a permanent update to Bitcoin's consensus rules—as the best long-term solution.
The current challenge does not deliver this network upgrade. The benchmarks build no live Bitcoin transactions, and the company states that the speedups still need testing against the actual production implementation before being considered reliable.
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