According to ChainCatcher, and reported by Fortune, a study from the University of Kent's School of Computing indicates that if Bitcoin wants to effectively guard against the threats posed by quantum computing, it will need to undergo a protocol update, which will cause the cryptocurrency to be offline for 76 days. The study also more realistically points out that Bitcoin could allocate 25% of its servers for protocol updates while allowing users to continue mining and trading at a slower pace. However, in that case, the downtime would extend to 305 days, or 10 months.
Carlos Perez-Delgado, a lecturer at the University of Kent, states that he cannot provide an exact figure for downtime costs, but it could be staggering. According to data from the Ponemon Institute, the cost of a business being down for one hour could be as high as $500,000. If Bitcoin were to be down for 76 days (which is what the study considers the best-case scenario), the update costs could reach $912 million.
In an interview, Perez-Delgado stated: "Even if your technology is down for just a few minutes or hours, it can be very, very costly. What we show in our paper is that for Bitcoin or any Bitcoin-like system, updates can take days, weeks, or even months." However, Perez-Delgado believes that given the emerging and 'imminent' quantum technology that could easily crack the encryption codes protecting vast amounts of online data, such slow and costly action is necessary.
Perez-Delgado is not trying to be alarmist. IBM predicts that within this decade, we are unlikely to have sufficiently large quantum computers to threaten current forms of encryption, so until then, its threat to cryptography remains hypothetical. However, Perez-Delgado warns that if quantum computers do pose a threat, all tech companies must take proactive measures.
