Is that possible? Would that require a significant amount of reworking?
Probably, but if means bitcoin is secure then they will have to do it. One day these hashes will be cracked, nothing soon but one day, so they have to have a plan in place for that.
I guess the biggest hurdle would be making it all backwards compatible. I heard that even changing the code to allow for more than 8 decimals would require a significant rewrite and everyone in the entire network accepting it, making it kind of like a "Y2K" issue.
Yeah it will be a big job, but this is stuff 20 yrs from now and hopefully Gavin will take some time to clean up the code, and make it modular, so things like that take one variable to be changed.