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A week of AI coding cut a quantum-safe bitcoin transaction estimate from $320 to $66
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- DeepHorus
StarkWare says AI-assisted coding has reduced its estimate for preparing a quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction to $66, down from about $320. The improvement could make an emergency defense against a future quantum attack more practical, although the lower figure has not been reproduced in another transaction mined on Bitcoin. For now, it is a benchmark-based projection rather than a settled production cost.
Bitcoinâs risk stems from the cryptography used to authorize spending. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could derive a private key from a public key already revealed on the blockchain and take the associated coins. StarkWareâs work targets that scenario with hash-based protection, giving eligible holders a way to move funds if a quantum threat emerges before the network adopts a broader solution.
The original $320 estimate came from an actual Bitcoin transaction mined in August. Preparing it consumed roughly 3,100 hours across a fleet of about 100 graphics processors. That amount covered only the computation completed before the transaction entered Bitcoin, excluding the fee paid to put it on the blockchain, and therefore should not be read as the transactionâs total on-chain expense.
StarkWare then opened the implementation to a competition, where participants used AI coding tools to accelerate its search for valid solutions. On the same benchmark graphics processor, the leading submission checked about 881 million candidates per second, compared with roughly 146 million per second for the starting code. The roughly sixfold benchmark gain helps explain the developer communityâs attention, but does not by itself establish the advertised end-to-end saving.
Despite the faster code, the $66 number remains an estimate rather than a mined-transaction result. CoinDeskâs calculation applying the leaderboard speedup to StarkWareâs listed cost breakdown produces about $83. StarkWare says later record runs exceeded the displayed measurements, but the site does not identify which results support the $66 projection, leaving the improvement plausible but incompletely documented.
The construction fits within Bitcoinâs current rules, so testing it did not require a soft fork or other network upgrade. Transactions must nevertheless be submitted directly to miners because they do not propagate through the network in the usual way. That requirement complicates wallet integration and may concentrate access among users able to coordinate with mining operations, even as it offers a bridge until developers settle on a broader quantum-resistance strategy.
The method cannot protect coins whose public keys are already exposedâthe assets a quantum attacker would target first. For institutions and long-term holders, its immediate appeal is a cheaper emergency option, not a sweeping upgrade to Bitcoinâs security. The next tests are clear: validate the $66 estimate on a fresh mined transaction, disclose the cost inputs, and demonstrate an ordinary wallet-to-miner workflow before wider adoption.
