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

Earlier this week, Bitcoin's core developers proposed a plan to protect 8 million coins from quantum attacks. However, according to Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, this plan is still insufficient to safeguard coins owned by Bitcoin's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, as stated in a video on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson believes that Bitcoin's proposed defense against quantum computers is both technically incorrect and structurally unable to protect the network's oldest coins, including the roughly 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. He argues that the BIP-361 proposal is being misrepresented as a soft fork when it actually requires a hard fork due to its invalidation of existing signature schemes. A hard fork is necessary to implement this change, which contradicts Bitcoin's historical opposition to such forks. The BIP-361 proposal suggests that users can reclaim frozen funds by creating a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase. However, Hoskinson claims that this approach cannot recover 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 details, arguing that Bitcoin's lack of formal on-chain governance hinders the network's ability to resolve tradeoffs through a structured process, leading to contentious upgrades being negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.