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

Earlier this week, Bitcoin's core developers proposed a solution to defend against quantum attacks by freezing 8 million coins. However, according to Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, this solution is still insufficient to protect the network's oldest coins, including those attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. Hoskinson stated that the proposed defense, BIP-361, is both technically incorrect and structurally incapable of safeguarding the network's earliest coins. He believes that BIP-361, which aims to phase out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, would require a hard fork due to its invalidation of existing signature schemes. Hoskinson emphasized that the distinction between a soft fork and a hard fork is crucial, as Bitcoin's development culture has historically opposed hard forks. A hard fork would change the rules fundamentally, causing old software to stop working entirely, whereas a soft fork tightens the rules, allowing old software to still work but without access to new features. 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 argued that this approach is unable to rescue approximately 1.7 million bitcoin that predate BIP-39's introduction 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, which relied on a local key pool rather than a deterministic seed. If the proposal passes in its current form, those coins would remain permanently frozen, regardless of whether their original owners attempt to migrate. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, acknowledged that he does not like the proposal and hopes it never needs to be adopted, describing it as a rough idea for a contingency plan. Lopp argued that freezing dormant coins would be preferable to allowing a future quantum attacker to recover and dump them on the market. Hoskinson's critique extends beyond the technical details, arguing that Bitcoin's lack of formal on-chain governance leaves the network unable to resolve tradeoffs through a structured process, forcing contentious upgrades to be negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.