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 Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, this plan is still insufficient to protect the coins belonging to the network's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, as stated in a video posted on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson believes that Bitcoin's proposed defense against quantum computers is both technically inaccurate and structurally incapable of safeguarding the network's oldest coins, including the approximately 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 mislabeled as a soft fork when it would actually require a hard fork due to its invalidation of existing signature schemes. A hard fork is necessary because it would change the rules so fundamentally that old software would stop working entirely, unless all users upgrade. The BIP-361 proposal suggests that users with frozen funds could reclaim them by creating a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase. However, Hoskinson claims that this approach cannot rescue the 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 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 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.