PANews December 17 news, according to Fortune magazine, a study by the University of Kent's School of Computing indicates that if Bitcoin wants to effectively guard against the threats posed by quantum computing, it needs to undergo protocol updates, which will result in the cryptocurrency being offline for 76 days. The study also more practically 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, stated that he could not provide an exact figure for the downtime costs, but it could be staggering. According to data from the Ponemon Institute, the cost of corporate downtime can reach up to $500,000 per hour. If Bitcoin were to be offline for 76 days (which the study considers the best-case scenario), the update costs could amount to $912 million. Perez-Delgado mentioned in an interview, "Even if your technology is only down for a few minutes or hours, it can be very, very expensive. What we show in the paper is that updates for Bitcoin or any Bitcoin-like system require days, weeks, or even months." However, Perez-Delgado believes that given the emerging and 'forthcoming' quantum technologies that could easily break the encryption codes protecting vast amounts of online data, such slow and costly actions are 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, the threat to cryptography remains hypothetical. But Perez-Delgado warns that if quantum computers do pose a threat, all technology companies must take proactive measures.
