According to PANews, a study by the University of Kent shows that Bitcoin needs to update its protocol to prevent the threat of quantum computing, which may require it to be offline for 76 days. If 25% of the servers are updated, the downtime can reach 305 days.
Lecturer Carlos Perez-Delgado said the cost of downtime could be as high as $912 million. Even a short outage could be very expensive, but the update is necessary to deal with the threat that quantum technology could pose.
IBM predicts that quantum computers are unlikely to threaten current forms of encryption within this decade, but Perez-Delgado warned technology companies to be proactive in addressing potential threats.
