Researchers Claim Bitcoin Can Be Made Quantum-Safe Without a Protocol Upgrade
The post Researchers Claim Bitcoin Can Be Made Quantum-Safe Without a Protocol Upgrade appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
StarkWare chief product officer Avihu Levy has proposed a crypto scheme that he claims would render Bitcoin transactions quantum computing-safe today – without requiring a soft fork, a hard fork, or any modification to the existing protocol. Published Thursday on GitHub, the Quantum Safe Bitcoin (QSB) proposal operates entirely within Bitcoin’s legacy script constraints and is designed to remain secure, Levy argues, even against an adversary running Shor’s algorithm on a large-scale quantum computer. The catch is substantial: each transaction would cost the sender between $75 and $150 in GPU compute, making the scheme impractical for routine use and limiting its relevance, at least initially, to large-value transfers. Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Transactions Without Softforkshttps://t.co/1lx5waX9VV pic.twitter.com/Ni7pA6dEsC — Avihu Levy ✨🐺 (@avihu28) April 9, 2026 DISCOVER: Best crypto to buy right now – CoinSpeaker’s updated guide Hash-to-Sig Puzzle Mechanism: What the Proposed Bitcoin Quantum Scheme Actually Does Bitcoin’s current signature scheme – the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm, or ECDSA – derives its security from the computational hardness of the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem. That hardness does not hold against a sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm, which can solve the problem in polynomial time. As recent research from Google Quantum AI has made increasingly concrete, the hardware threshold for executing such an attack may be closer than previously modeled – with estimates suggesting ECDLP-256 could be broken using roughly 500,000 physical qubits, a 20-fold compression from prior projections. Levy’s proposal sidesteps ECDSA entirely by replacing the proof-of-work signature-size puzzle with what he terms a hash-to-sig puzzle. Rather than proving knowledge of a private key through elliptic curve math, the spender must find an input whose hash output randomly resembles a valid ECDSA signature – a brute-force search task that offers no shortcut to quantum computing algorithms. The security model, in…
Filed under: News - @ April 10, 2026 9:32 am