Researchers Say Bitcoin Can Be Made Quantum-Safe Without Protocol Upgrade

A StarkWare researcher has outlined a method to make Bitcoin transactions quantum-resistant today — no soft fork required. The catch? It costs up to $150 per transaction in GPU compute. That detail changes everything about who this actually helps.

StarkWare Chief Product Officer Avihu Levy published a proposal on GitHub on Thursday, introducing a Quantum Safe Bitcoin (QSB) transaction scheme. The design replaces elliptic curve math — the cryptography Google Quantum AI has flagged as vulnerable to Shor’s algorithm, with a hash-to-sig puzzle requiring brute-force work that quantum hardware cannot shortcut.

Crucially, the scheme operates entirely within Bitcoin’s existing legacy script constraints, requiring zero protocol changes. Levy himself acknowledges the $75–$150 per-transaction GPU cost makes it unsuitable for everyday use, positioning QSB as a stopgap for large BTC holders while the community develops a long-term consensus path.

The proposal lands inside a broader and increasingly urgent debate. Google’s quantum benchmarks have already rattled confidence in ECDSA-secured assets, and the Bitcoin community remains split on how aggressively to respond — making this week’s developments worth watching closely.

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Can Bitcoin Price Hold $72,000 While Quantum Uncertainty Builds?

Bitcoin is consolidating near $72,000, a level that has emerged as a short-term pivot point as quantum security headlines inject a low-grade but persistent uncertainty into the market. No dramatic 24-hour swing has accompanied this week’s research news, which is itself telling. The market, for now, is treating quantum risk as a long-horizon problem.

Bernstein analysts estimate a 3–5 year window before cryptographically relevant quantum computers emerge, with approximately 1.7 million BTC in legacy P2PK and early multisig addresses considered most exposed. SHA-256 mining, by contrast, is not considered at risk. That asymmetry matters for price modeling: the threat is real but scoped.

This whole narrative is shifting from fear to upgrade, because if the BIP-360 work keeps progressing and big players keep backing it, the quantum risk starts looking less like a threat and more like a long-term catalyst, which is how Bitcoin holds strength above $72K and keeps momentum intact.

For now, though, it still looks like a wait phase, with price holding steady while developers move toward consensus and no real panic coming from long-term holders, so nothing breaks, but nothing fully runs either.

The real risk is if that timeline suddenly speeds up or a credible threat shows up earlier than expected, because anything that introduces urgency into the upgrade process can spike volatility fast and shake confidence at current levels.

Cryptographer Adam Back has argued that Taproot’s 2021 tapleaf structure already enables backward-compatible post-quantum upgrades without exposing funds to access risks. Bernstein concurs the window is manageable, but the clock is acknowledged to be running.

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