Cardano Founder 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 proposed a plan to freeze 8 million coins in an effort to defend against quantum attacks. However, according to a video posted by Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, this proposal is still insufficient to safeguard the coins belonging to the network's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Hoskinson asserts that the proposed defense mechanism, BIP-361, is technically mislabeled and structurally flawed, making it unable to protect the network's oldest coins, including the roughly 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. He argues that BIP-361 would require a hard fork, as it invalidates existing signature schemes that users are actively relying on. A hard fork is a significant change to the network's rules that would render old software obsolete, whereas a soft fork is a more minor update that still allows old software to function. The BIP-361 proposal suggests that users with frozen funds could reclaim them by constructing a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase. However, Hoskinson claims that this approach is ineffective for approximately 1.7 million bitcoin that predate BIP-39's introduction 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 acknowledged that the proposal is not ideal and hopes it never needs to be adopted. 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.