AI contest cuts quantum-safe bitcoin transaction cost to $66

StarkWare says a week of AI-assisted coding competition cut the estimated compute cost of preparing a quantum-resistant bitcoin transaction to $66 from about $320 — roughly five times faster. The earlier figure came from a quantum-safe transaction mined on Bitcoin in August that consumed about 3,100 GPU-hours across ~100 graphics processors, before network fees.

• Leading contest submissions checked about 881 million candidates per second, versus roughly 146 million for the starting code.
• The method uses hash-based protection that fits within Bitcoin's existing rules, so it requires no network upgrade.
• The $66 figure remains an estimate — it has not been demonstrated in another mined transaction, and the method requires sending transactions directly to miners and cannot protect coins whose public keys are already exposed.

StarkWare frames the result as making an emergency option more practical for moving unexposed balances if a capable quantum computer arrives before Bitcoin adopts a broader fix.