Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Transaction Compute Costs Drop 82% to $59 Amid Long-Term Soft Fork Calls

Simulated GPU computation costs for Quantum-Safe Bitcoin transactions have dropped 82% from $320 to $59 following an optimization challenge led by StarkWare, Yukon Research, and Eigen Labs. While search benchmarks exceeded 1 billion verified candidates per second on an Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU, practical hurdles persist. QSB transactions remain nonstandard, requiring direct routing through mining services such as MARA's Slipstream. Moreover, QSB cannot retroactively protect roughly 6.04 million BTC with exposed public keys, prompting StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson to emphasize that permanent network security will ultimately require a consensus-level soft fork.