A technical proposal released on Thursday completely transformed the discussions within the Bitcoin community regarding strategies to address quantum threats. Avihu Levy, Chief Product Officer of StarkWare, proposed an innovative mechanism called quantum-safe Bitcoin. The core idea of this approach is that immediate quantum security can be achieved within the existing script framework, without requiring any modifications to the underlying protocol through a soft fork. Even in the face of attacks from large-scale quantum computers running the Shor algorithm, transaction validity would still be maintained.

This groundbreaking proposal sparked intense debates within the community about the technical path to be taken and the boundaries of security, marking a shift in Bitcoin's defense strategy from passive waiting to proactive establishment of temporary defenses. The technical logic behind this approach lies in reengineering the traditional proof-of-work-based signature generation process into a hash-value-based verification mechanism. Transactions require the sender to find specific input values that generate hash values matching the characteristics of valid ECDSA signatures. This design utilizes the computational complexity of mathematical operations to create a defensive barrier, ensuring that even the presence of quantum computers cannot reduce the time required for verification.

However, according to Monitored by Woofun AI, such high levels of security come at the expense of enormous computational resources. Each transaction requires 75 to 150 dollars worth of GPU power, making it suitable primarily as an emergency backup for large-value transactions rather than a regular payment method. Eli Ben-Sasson, CEO of StarkWare, is optimistic, arguing that Bitcoin already possesses quantum security. However, Daniel Batten, an ESG expert in Bitcoin, believes this claim is exaggerated, as existing research does not address the protection of publicly available keys and dormant wallets.

Approximately 1.7 million Bitcoins are locked in early P2PK addresses, and these static assets are extremely vulnerable to quantum computing. The community holds significant disagreements regarding how to handle such assets, with opinions ranging from maintaining the status quo to completely freezing and destroying them or upgrading the protocol to support new signature mechanisms. Researchers acknowledge that this approach is non-standard and temporary, leading to significant differences in transaction costs among users and incompatibility with layer-2 extension technologies like Lightning Network. Therefore, in the long run, modifying the Bitcoin protocol itself remains the more viable solution.

A paper published by Google in March further heightened the community's sense of urgency, showing that quantum computers require far fewer resources to crack Bitcoin's encryption mechanism than previously estimated. Olaoluwa Osuntokun, Chief Technology Officer of Lightning Labs, subsequently presented a prototype for a quantum escape channel, which allows users to prove their ownership while protecting their original seed phrases, paving the way for future diversified authorization methods for Bitcoin.