Quantum Archives

Bitcoin developers are working on emergency style defenses for a problem that may still be years away. One idea tries to protect large transfers right now. Another tries to help wallet holders prove ownership if normal signatures ever stop being safe. Good to Know A StarkWare proposal says Bitcoin transactions can be made quantum safe today without changing Bitcoin protocol rules, but the method is expensive. Lightning Labs CTO Olaoluwa Osuntokun has shown a working prototype that proves wallet ownership from a seed without revealing the seed. Google said in March that future quantum systems may need fewer resources than earlier estimates to break elliptic curve cryptography. The cheaper fix is not here. The fast one is not here either. What Bitcoin has instead are two rough backup plans that attack the same risk from different sides. StarkWare goes after transaction security. Lightning Labs goes after wallet recovery. Fix No.1 Avihu Levy of StarkWare proposed Quantum Safe Bitcoin, or QSB. The idea avoids the normal elliptic curve signature path and uses a hash based puzzle instead. In plain terms, the sender brute forces an input until the result looks like a valid signature. Levy argues a large scale quantum machine does not get the same shortcut there that it gets against elliptic curve math. That sounds useful, but the tradeoff is rough. One transfer may need about $75 to $150 in GPU compute, and some reports put the cost even closer to $200 depending on setup. QSB also does not scale well, produces non standard transactions, and does not solve Lightning use cases. So the design fits large BTC transfers far better than normal payments. Fix No.2 The second route is very different. Olaoluwa Osuntokun built a prototype that lets a user prove a wallet came from the original seed phrase, without exposing that seed. So ownership gets shown through wallet origin rather than through the normal signature route a future quantum machine might attack. Performance is already decent for a prototype. Reports on the demo said proof generation took around 50 seconds on a normal laptop, verification took less than two seconds, and the proof size was about 1.7 megabytes. No rollout plan exists yet, but the idea is no longer just theory on a whiteboard. Google helped raise the pressure around all of this. In late March, researchers said future quantum computers may need far fewer physical qubits than older estimates to crack cryptography like the elliptic curve systems used in Bitcoin. That does not mean danger is immediate, but it does make preparation feel more urgent. A harder part of the debate sits outside future payments. Older P2PK wallets with exposed public keys remain a weak point in many discussions around quantum risk. That is why the community keeps splitting into camps over upgrades, freezes, burns, and emergency tools. QSB does not settle that fight, and the Lightning Labs prototype does not settle it either. Both ideas simply give Bitcoin more time and a bit more room to work with while a larger protocol answer is still missing.

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