STARKWARE SAYS IT PUT THE FIRST QUANTUM-RESISTANT TRANSACTION ON BITCOIN ITSELF — NO RULE CHANGE, JUST HOURS OF GRINDING AND A FRIENDLY MINER — TWO RIVAL ANSWERS TO ONE PROBLEM, HOURS APART

The same day Blockstream put new signature math on paper, StarkWare showed a workaround that needs no new rules at all. The company says it executed the first quantum-resistant transaction on Bitcoin’s main network — not with post-quantum cryptography, but with “signature grinding”: burning hours of computing to shape an ordinary signature so it never exposes the material a quantum computer could attack while the transaction waits to confirm. The catch is real: the result is so unusual that normal nodes ignore it, so it had to be handed straight to a cooperating miner — MARA, through its Slipstream service. The Technologist read: qualify everything and it still matters. It is StarkWare’s own claim; the honest scope is “first on mainnet,” since SHRINCS has signed on the Liquid sidechain since March; and StarkWare’s own CEO calls it a lifeboat, not the fix — Bitcoin still needs a protocol upgrade. But the fork in the road is now plain: one camp is building new math for a soft fork, the other just proved you can buy protection under today’s rules if you are willing to pay for it in compute. And now the receipt is on the chain: transaction 305a24ff…ab07 sits in block 964,199, a 1,321-vbyte spend built with a construction called Quantum Safe Bitcoin — QSB, by Avihu Levy and Tom Giladi — that hides a hash-based one-time-signature puzzle inside Bitcoin’s existing Script rules, with the code public for hostile review. The limits stay stated flat: it protects only coins deliberately moved into it, does nothing for already-exposed keys, has no wallet format and no migration path — and Levy himself calls it “a research quirk.” Two rival answers to the same problem, published hours apart. Both are lifeboats. The ship is still being argued about.