A week of AI coding cut a quantum-safe bitcoin transaction estimate from $320 to $66
A competition using AI coding tools has significantly reduced the estimated cost of performing quantum-safe Bitcoin transactions. By optimizing the underlying code, developers lowered the computational expense from $320 to $66 per transaction.
Why it matters
This development provides a more practical emergency solution for protecting Bitcoin against future quantum computing threats without requiring network-wide upgrades.
The earlier figure came from a transaction mined on Bitcoin in August . Preparing it took roughly 3,100 hours of computing time across a fleet of about 100 graphics processors. That $320 was the cost of the computing work done before the transaction reached Bitcoin, separate from the fee paid to put it on the blockchain.
StarkWare then opened the code to a competition. Participants, many working with AI coding tools, tried to make it search through possible solutions faster. The leaderboard shows a leading submission checking about 881 million candidates a second, against roughly 146 million for the starting code on the same benchmark graphics processor.
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