A new Bitcoin proposal says users could protect transactions against future quantum attacks without changing the network’s core protocol.
The design, called Quantum-Safe Bitcoin, would work within Bitcoin’s existing scripting rules rather than through a soft fork.
Bitcoin’s looming quantum problem may have a workaround that does not require the usual political headache of a protocol upgrade.
That is the claim behind a proposal from StarkWare researcher Avihu Mordechai Levy, who argues that Bitcoin transactions could be made resistant to future quantum attacks using a new transaction design that fits inside the network’s current rules. In other words, no soft fork, no hard fork, no rewriting of Bitcoin’s base layer just to get started.
A quantum defense that stays inside Bitcoin’s current framework
Levy’s paper outlines what he calls Quantum-Safe Bitcoin, or QSB, a transaction scheme intended to remain secure even if quantum computers eventually break the elliptic-curv
