But there are ways to deal with this kind of failing in security upgrade. New Scientist opens in new tab first reported on the study. Sizable dormant wallets, like the ones containing around 1 million Bitcoins that supposedly belong to Satoshi Nakamoto, likely will never see an encryption enhancement. Within a decade, quantum computers could be powerful enough to break the cryptographic security that protects cell phones, bank accounts, email addresses and — yes — bitcoin wallets. Within a decade, quantum computing is expected to be able to hack into cell phones, bank accounts, email addresses and bitcoin wallets. The Sussex scientists, led by Mark Webber, explain that every Bitcoin transaction is assigned a cryptographic key, which is vulnerable for a finite time, which might vary from 10 minutes to an hour, to a day. However, this kind of upgrade in security requires users to be proactive. This is precisely why cryptographers around the world are racing to build a quantum-resistant encryption protocol. To activate a switch to the new key, users will have to sign for approval with their old one. I'd tell you that among the first types of digital signatures that will be broken by quantum computers are elliptic curves, as we use them today, for bitcoin wallets," said Thorsten Groetker, former Utimaco CTO and one of the top experts in the field of quantum computing.