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 mechanism against quantum attacks. However, Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, 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 argues that the proposed quantum defense is both technically incorrect and structurally flawed, making it incapable of protecting the network's oldest coins, including the roughly 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi. He claims that BIP-361, a proposal aimed at phasing out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, is being misrepresented 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 and hard fork is crucial, as Bitcoin's development culture has traditionally opposed hard forks, viewing them as a violation of the network's immutability. The BIP-361 proposal suggests that users with frozen funds could recover them by creating a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase. Nonetheless, Hoskinson contends that this method 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 activities. These early coins were generated using a different key derivation method, making it impossible for their owners to provide the necessary cryptographic proof to reclaim them. Jameson Lopp, the core developer behind 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 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, forcing contentious upgrades to be negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.