Charles Hoskinson Claims Bitcoin's Quantum Solution Is a Hard Fork That Cannot Protect Satoshi's Coins

Earlier this week, Bitcoin's core developers proposed a plan to protect 8 million coins from quantum attacks. However, Cardano's founder, Charles Hoskinson, believes this plan is still insufficient to safeguard the coins owned by Bitcoin's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, as stated in a video on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson claims that Bitcoin's proposed defense against quantum computers is both technically incorrect and structurally incapable of protecting the network's oldest coins, including the roughly 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. He argues that the BIP-361 proposal, 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. 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. A soft fork allows old software to continue working, albeit 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. The BIP-361 proposal 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 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, 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 acknowledged that the proposal is not ideal and hopes it will never be necessary. 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.