Last week they sold you the delivery. “First quantum-safe transaction on mainnet! No fork. No upgrade. No permission asked.” Champagne emojis everywhere. What nobody put in the keynote slides: the miracle costs up to $200 every time you use it, cannot survive the public mempool, and only works if a single miner likes you. The community that cheered it is now tearing itself apart over the fine print.
The receipts are public. On August 26, a transaction built on StarkWare researcher Avihu Levy’s Quantum Safe Bitcoin (QSB) construction was confirmed in block 964,199, spending a modest 10,000-satoshi output. Hash-based signatures replace the vulnerable elliptic-curve math, protected by a technique called signature grinding – millions of candidate signatures computed off-chain until one with the right structural property appears. That grinding is not free: hours of GPU compute, priced at $150 to $200 per transaction. Cointelegraph flagged the $75-150 bill way back in April, the moment the paper dropped.
THE PERMISSIONLESS NETWORK’S QUANTUM FIX NEEDS EXACTLY ONE COMPANY’S PERMISSION
The transaction is non-standard. Bitcoin Core nodes will not relay it, so it could not enter the public mempool at all – it was delivered straight to MARA’s Slipstream service to be included by one cooperative miner. The network that ran on “don’t trust, verify” just watched its quantum savior arrive with a gatekeeper attached.
And it protects almost nobody. QSB is opt-in: your coins must be moved into the special format BEFORE the threat shows up. An estimated 7 million Bitcoin still sit in UTXOs with exposed public keys, waiting for a quantum computer that may already be unrolling. The fix did not fix them. The savior is a lifeboat with a ticket price most of the network can’t afford to board.
Now watch the split. Half the timeline screams “Bitcoin defended itself, no fork needed!” The other half screams back: “A $200 transaction that rides on MARA’s goodwill and leaves 7 million coins in the blast radius? That’s not a fix, that’s a sales pitch for StarkWare’s soft fork agenda.” And both of them are right. StarkWare’s own CEO called QSB a bridge – to the consensus-level soft fork they have been asking for all along. The “we saved ourselves” miracle ended with a consulting bill.
WHY THIS IS YOUR FIGHT
The quantum-proof future belongs only to the people who hold their own keys. The self-custodians who can move their coins into new tools the moment they ship. Your exchange account is not quantum-proof. Your fund’s ledger is not quantum-proof. Your coins are only ever as safe as the wallet you control yourself. Get ready on your own terms: buy Bitcoin through Bull Bitcoin with coupon LOVEISBITCOIN, and keep it in a wallet only you hold the keys to.
Read the full backstory: they said quantum computers would destroy Bitcoin – and the first quantum-safe transaction still hit mainnet without a single fork.
So ask yourself: when the fix costs $200, needs a single miner’s blessing, and can’t survive the public mempool – is that still Bitcoin? Or is it just the old bank, with better marketing and a GPU bill?
This article is for education only and is not financial advice.
THE QUANTUM 'MIRACLE FIX' COSTS $200 PER TRANSACTION, NEEDS A MINER'S PERMISSION, AND JUST SPLIT THE COMMUNITY
