Charles Hoskinson Claims Bitcoin's Quantum Solution is a Hard Fork That Cannot Rescue Satoshi's Coins

Earlier this week, Bitcoin's core developers suggested freezing 8 million coins to safeguard against quantum attacks. However, Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, believes this proposal is still inadequate to protect the network's oldest coins, including the roughly 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. Hoskinson argues that BIP-361, which aims to phase out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, is being misleadingly presented as a soft fork when it would actually require a hard fork due to its invalidation of existing signature schemes. A hard fork would be necessary to implement this change, according to Hoskinson. The BIP-361 proposal suggests that users with frozen funds could reclaim them by creating a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase. Nevertheless, Hoskinson claims that this approach is ineffective for approximately 1.7 million bitcoin that predate the introduction of BIP-39 in 2013, including the coins associated with Satoshi's early mining activity. These early coins were generated using a different key derivation method and would remain permanently frozen if the proposal passes in its current form. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has expressed his dislike for the proposal, describing it as a rough idea for a contingency plan rather than a finalized specification. Hoskinson's criticism extends beyond the technical aspects, arguing that Bitcoin's lack of formal on-chain governance hinders the network's ability to resolve tradeoffs through a structured process.