Charles Hoskinson: Bitcoin's Quantum Solution is a Hard Fork that Fails to Rescue Satoshi's Coins

Following a proposal by Bitcoin's core developers to freeze 8 million coins as a defense against quantum attacks, Cardano's founder Charles Hoskinson expressed his doubts about the plan's ability to protect Satoshi Nakamoto's coins. In a video, Hoskinson argued that the proposed solution, BIP-361, is misclassified as a soft fork and would actually require a hard fork due to its impact on existing signature schemes. He emphasized that this distinction is crucial, given Bitcoin's historical opposition to hard forks. Furthermore, Hoskinson claimed that BIP-361's zero-knowledge recovery plan is flawed and cannot recover roughly 1.7 million pre-2013 bitcoins, including Satoshi's holdings, as these coins were generated using a different key derivation method. This method, used by the original Bitcoin wallet software, relied on a local key pool rather than a deterministic seed, making it incompatible with the proposed recovery plan. Hoskinson's criticism extends beyond the technical aspects, highlighting Bitcoin's lack of formal on-chain governance as a significant obstacle in resolving such tradeoffs. He believes that this lack of governance forces contentious upgrades to be negotiated through informal channels, rather than a structured process.