Cardano Founder Disputes Bitcoin's Quantum Computing Fix, Claims It Won't Save Satoshi's Coins

This week, Bitcoin's core developers proposed a plan to protect the network against quantum attacks by freezing 8 million coins. However, Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, believes this plan is technically and structurally flawed, and won't be able to safeguard the network's oldest coins, including those attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. Hoskinson argues that BIP-361, the proposal aimed at phasing out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, is being mislabeled as a soft fork when it actually requires a hard fork. He claims that this approach would invalidate existing signature schemes that users are currently relying on, which would necessitate a hard fork. A hard fork is a change to the network's rules that would render old software obsolete and potentially split the network unless all users upgrade. In contrast, 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 recover them by creating a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase. However, Hoskinson points out that this approach won't work for approximately 1.7 million bitcoins 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, which relied on a local key pool rather than a deterministic seed. As a result, their owners would be unable to provide the necessary cryptographic proof to recover their funds. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has expressed his dissatisfaction with the proposal, describing it as a rough contingency plan rather than a finalized specification. Lopp estimates that freezing dormant coins, which he believes to be around 5.6 million bitcoins, would be a better option than allowing a future quantum attacker to recover and dump them on the market. 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.