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

This week, Bitcoin's core developers proposed a plan to freeze 8 million coins to shield against quantum attacks. However, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson believes this plan is insufficient to safeguard the coins belonging to the network's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, as stated in a video on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson asserts that the proposed defense against quantum computers is both technically incorrect and structurally incapable of protecting the network's oldest coins. He argues that BIP-361, a proposal aimed at phasing out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, is incorrectly presented as a soft fork, as it would 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 historically opposed hard forks. The 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 unable to rescue 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, which would leave them 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. Hoskinson's critique 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.