Andreas Antonopoulos: Satoshi Nakamoto's two-layer protection design is a genius work that can prevent quantum computing destruction

Andreas Antonopoulos is a well-known speaker and visionary in the Bitcoin community. Recently, there have been many conversations and media headlines discussing the development of quantum computers that can break elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). Antonopoulos believes that as quantum computing research progresses further, Bitcoin will be protected from the impact of quantum computers if the system is upgraded. The technologist also explained in detail that the genius of Satoshi Nakamoto had a preconceived plan to deal with the problems of quantum computing from the beginning.

Breaking Bitcoin’s Elliptic Curve Will Reveal Its Most Important Secret

An audience member at Antonopoulos’ keynote asked:

“For example, is it possible that an NSA quantum computer could break Bitcoin’s encryption?”

Antonopoulos responded:

“It is certain that the NSA has indeed created a quantum computer, because Google already has one in its data center. If the NSA’s is ten times better than Google’s, then it will cost as much as the moon landing and can indeed break encryption systems at a much faster speed and efficiency. But the question is - will the NSA use this quantum computer to break Bitcoin?”

"The answer is simple: No. Historically, if you had such a thing as a quantum computer, it would be a treasure and would be kept secret. Whenever you used such a thing, you had to make up a story to tell the world that you had successfully broken the encryption, but it was not with this thing because it did not exist. When the British cracked Germany's Enigma in World War II, they still let the Germans sink their battleships because they could not make up a good story to explain how they knew how the German submarines were approaching. They allowed cities to continue to be bombed because they could not make up a good story to explain how they knew these places were going to be bombed, because if they could not make up a good enough story, then the British could not risk revealing that they had cracked Enigma, which was their most important secret."

“The last thing the NSA is going to do is use quantum computers on Bitcoin. Because when you do that, you’re announcing to the world that you have quantum cryptography that can break elliptic curves — and guess what? Your nuclear rivals can easily upgrade their own cryptography and try to implement quantum-resistant cryptography — there’s a lot of research going on and there are a lot of good candidates. You can easily throw away all that research and progress just to go after a cryptocurrency.

Satoshi Nakamoto’s two-layer design choice is absolutely genius

During a discussion on the topic of quantum computers breaking Bitcoin encryption, Antonopoulos said there are two fundamental cryptographic systems that keep Bitcoin secure. Antonopoulos explained that the way Satoshi Nakamoto designed these elements was no accident.

“No, the NSA will never attack us with its quantum computers. But it will be interesting to see what happens when quantum computing becomes commercially available and widely used. In retrospect, Satoshi’s choice of a two-tier design was absolutely genius. First, Bitcoin uses two fundamental cryptographic systems to achieve its security. One is elliptic curve multiplication over prime fields (a one-way function). This depends on prime factorization mathematics, which is vulnerable to quantum technology. The second is hashing algorithms, which are actually not factorizable by quantum technology. We currently do not have very good algorithms to break hashing using quantum computing.”

“So what Satoshi did was he didn’t just put his elliptic curve public key in transactions until they were spent. Your bitcoin address is a double-hashed version of your public key — which means it’s not visible to anyone until you claim it with a spend transaction — so if you use basic best practices, where you use a bitcoin address only once and use a different address for every transaction, and each spend redirects all the bitcoins in the address to the new address, then when your public key is first published to the network, your address no longer contains any funds — you can hack it and it’s empty.”

The second layer needs to be upgraded to be useful

Antonopoulos believes that Satoshi’s choice to add these two layers of protection was a stroke of genius. In the future, the Bitcoin community will have to prepare for quantum computers that could break the elliptic curve, and at that point, the Bitcoin protocol will have to be upgraded.

“All this means is that you can’t go back and look at the keys that were addresses three years ago and break them because you don’t have those public keys. What you have is a double hash of those addresses. And that little genius design element is not accidental. In fact, this creates a second layer of abstraction for the underlying cryptographic algorithm that elliptic curve digital signatures use, which allows you to do future upgrades. What this means is that the Bitcoin cryptography was secure in the past because it was hidden in a second layer of a different algorithm, and it can be changed in the future because you can create an address that is not an elliptic curve hash address, or a different elliptic curve hash address, or a larger elliptic curve hash address, or a quantum-resistant elliptic curve-independent signature algorithm hash. So you can make future-proof changes to make it secure, and you’ve got backwards protection because you’ve hidden the past.”

He also said:

“Most people are missing this genius design element of Satoshi. So if quantum computers come, we’ll upgrade.”