PANews reported on December 17 that according to Fortune magazine, a study by the School of Computer Science at the University of Kent showed that if Bitcoin wants to effectively guard against the threat posed by quantum computing, it needs to update the protocol, which will cause the cryptocurrency to be offline for 76 days. The study also pointed out more realistically that Bitcoin can also use 25% of its servers for protocol updates while allowing users to continue mining and trading at a slower speed. But in that case, the downtime will be as long as 305 days, or 10 months.
Carlos Perez-Delgado, a lecturer at the University of Kent, said it was impossible to give an exact figure for the cost of downtime, but it could be staggering. According to the Ponemon Institute, an hour of downtime can cost a business up to $500,000. If Bitcoin is down for 76 days (which is the best case scenario considered by the study), the cost of updating could reach $912 million. Perez-Delgado said in an interview: "Even if your technology is down for only a few minutes or a few hours, it can be very, very expensive. What we show in the paper is that for Bitcoin or any Bitcoin-like system, it takes days, weeks, or even months to update." But Perez-Delgado believes that this slow and expensive action is necessary given that emerging and "upcoming" quantum technology may easily crack the encryption code that protects large amounts of online data.
Perez-Delgado isn’t trying to be alarmist. IBM predicts that we’re unlikely to have quantum computers large enough to threaten current forms of encryption this decade, so until then, the threat to cryptography remains hypothetical. But Perez-Delgado warns that if quantum computers do pose a threat, all tech companies will have to take proactive action.
