Study: Bitcoin needs more than 300 days of downtime to fully withstand quantum computing threats

PANews reported on December 17 that according to Fortune Magazine, a study by the School of Computing at the University of Kent showed that if Bitcoin wants to effectively protect against the threats posed by quantum computing, it will need to carry out a protocol update, which will cause the cryptocurrency to go offline. 76 days. The study also states more realistically that Bitcoin could also dedicate 25% of its servers to protocol updates while allowing users to continue mining and transacting at a slower rate. 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 he could not put an exact figure on the cost of downtime, but it would likely be eye-popping. According to the Ponemon Institute, one hour of downtime can cost a business as much as $500,000. If Bitcoin is down for 76 days, which is the best-case scenario considered by the study, the cost of the update could reach $912 million. “Even if your technology is down for only a few minutes or a few hours, it can be very, very expensive,” Perez-Delgado said in an interview. “What we show in the paper is that for Bitcoin or any Bitcoin-like system , making updates can take days, weeks or even months.” But Perez-Delgado believes that this is slow and expensive, given that emerging and “upcoming” quantum technologies could easily break the encryption codes that protect large amounts of online data. Action is necessary.

Perez-Delgado doesn't mean to be alarmist. IBM predicts that we are unlikely to have a quantum computer large enough to threaten current forms of encryption within this decade, so until then, the threat to cryptography remains hypothetical. But Perez-Delgado warned that if quantum computers truly pose a threat, all technology companies must take proactive action.