Charles Hoskinson Claims Bitcoin's Quantum Solution is a Hard Fork That Fails to Protect Satoshi's Coins

Earlier this week, Bitcoin's core developers suggested freezing 8 million coins as a defense against quantum attacks. However, Cardano's founder, Charles Hoskinson, believes this approach is still insufficient to safeguard the coins belonging to the network's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, as stated in a video on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson asserts that Bitcoin's proposed defense against quantum computers is both technically incorrect and fundamentally incapable of protecting the network's oldest coins, including the roughly 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. He claims that BIP-361, a proposal aimed at phasing out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, is misleadingly presented as a soft fork when it would actually require a hard fork due to its invalidation of existing signature schemes. According to Hoskinson, the distinction between a soft fork and a hard fork is crucial, as Bitcoin's development culture has traditionally opposed hard forks, viewing them as violations of the network's immutability. The proposal's authors have described it as a soft fork, a characterization Hoskinson disputes. A soft fork tightens the rules, allowing old software to continue functioning but without access to new features, whereas a hard fork changes the rules so fundamentally that old software becomes obsolete, and the network splits unless all users upgrade. BIP-361 suggests that users with frozen quantum-vulnerable funds could recover them by creating a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase. However, Hoskinson argues that this approach is ineffective for approximately 1.7 million bitcoin that predate BIP-39's introduction in 2013, including the roughly 1 million coins associated with Satoshi's early mining activity. These early coins were generated using a different key derivation method, which relied on a local key pool rather than a deterministic seed, making it impossible for their owners to provide the necessary cryptographic proof for migration. If the proposal is adopted in its current form, these coins would remain permanently frozen. 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. Lopp argues that freezing dormant coins would be preferable to allowing a future quantum attacker to recover and dump them on the market. Hoskinson's critique 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, forcing contentious upgrades to be negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.