Cardano's 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 that this approach will not be able to safeguard the coins belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of the network. In a video posted on his YouTube channel, Hoskinson stated that Bitcoin's proposed defense against quantum computers is both technically incorrect and structurally incapable of protecting the network's oldest coins, including the approximately 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. He argued that the BIP-361 proposal, which aims to phase 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. Hoskinson emphasized that the distinction between a soft fork and a hard fork is crucial, as Bitcoin's development culture has historically opposed hard forks. A soft fork tightens the rules, allowing old software to still work but not utilize new features, whereas a hard fork changes the rules fundamentally, causing old software to stop working entirely and potentially splitting the network unless all users upgrade. The BIP-361 proposal suggests that users with frozen quantum-vulnerable funds could reclaim them by creating a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase. However, Hoskinson argued that this approach is inadequate for rescuing approximately 1.7 million bitcoin that predate the introduction of BIP-39 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 to migrate them. If the proposal is implemented in its current form, these coins would remain permanently frozen. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has expressed his dissatisfaction with the proposal, describing it as a rough idea for a contingency plan rather than a finalized specification. 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.