Hi everyone, I am to share a technical demonstration and benchmarking project that integrates the Falcon post-quantum signature scheme (Falcon-512) into Bitcoin Core, implemented as a soft-fork within the classic P2WPKH mode. This work aims to provide a practical reference for possible future Falcon adoption, especially as it approaches FIPS standardization. You can find details at this fork <https://github.com/thisisnotgcsar/bitcoin-falcon>.
*Why Falcon?* Falcon is a lattice-based, post-quantum digital signature scheme designed to be secure against quantum attacks. Unlike other PQC candidates such as SPHINCS+ and ML-DSA, Falcon offers significantly smaller signature and public key sizes, as well as efficient signing and verification times. It is implemented in pure C and does not require external dependencies. *Benchmarking & Results* Aspect Falcon ECDSA Public Key Size (B) 897 33 Signature Size (B) 655 71 Verification Time (μs) 57 120 Verification time is more critical than signature creation time in Bitcoin, since signature creation is performed by clients (wallets), while nodes focus on verification. *Integration* - Falcon was included into the codebase from the original GitHub repository. - The build system (CMakeLists.txt) was updated to support Falcon. - Falcon verification has been soft-fork enabled via a new script verification flag. *Next Steps & Reference* This project serves as a practical demonstration of Falcon’s promising performance, highlighting its advantages over currently selected post-quantum signature algorithms such as SPHINCS+ and ML-DSA, which face significant time and space limitations. As Falcon approaches FIPS standardization, this work aims to provide a reference for future adoption and integration in Bitcoin. Let me know what you think and if this could be of interest for which case I can complement the project by integrating Falcon into all the other spending paths. I also look forward to development/integration corrections. Best regards, Giulio -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Bitcoin Development Mailing List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bitcoindev/16e01530-e9dd-481f-8c7f-ca9ccafcfcden%40googlegroups.com.
