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

Recently, Bitcoin's core developers suggested freezing 8 million coins as a defense mechanism against quantum attacks. However, Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, believes this approach is still insufficient to protect the coins belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto, the network's pseudonymous creator, as stated in a video on his YouTube channel. According to Hoskinson, the proposed defense against quantum computers, BIP-361, is both technically misclassified and structurally incapable of safeguarding the network's oldest coins, including the roughly 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi. He asserts that BIP-361, which aims to phase out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, is being misrepresented as a soft fork when it would, in fact, require a hard fork due to its invalidation of existing signature schemes that users are currently relying on. Hoskinson emphasized that a hard fork is necessary to implement this change, which is significant because Bitcoin's development culture has historically opposed hard forks, viewing them as violations of the network's immutability. The authors of BIP-361 have described the proposal as a soft fork, a characterization that Hoskinson disputes. A key distinction between soft and hard forks is that a soft fork tightens the rules, allowing old software to continue working, albeit without access to new features, whereas a hard fork changes the rules fundamentally, causing old software to cease working entirely and potentially splitting the network unless all users upgrade. BIP-361 proposes that users with frozen quantum-vulnerable funds could reclaim them by constructing a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase, a standard for generating wallet keys from a recoverable phrase. Nevertheless, Hoskinson argues that this approach is ineffective for rescuing 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 from the original Bitcoin wallet software, which relied on a local key pool rather than a deterministic seed. If the proposal is implemented in its current form, those coins would remain permanently frozen, regardless of whether their original owners attempt to migrate, because migration would require cryptographic proof that they are unable to provide. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has acknowledged that he does not favor the proposal and hopes it never needs to be adopted, describing it as a rough idea for a contingency plan rather than a finalized specification. Lopp argues that freezing dormant coins, which he estimates at 5.6 million bitcoin, would be preferable to allowing a future quantum attacker to recover and dump them on the market. Hoskinson's broader critique extends beyond the technical details, arguing that Bitcoin's lack of formal on-chain governance leaves the network unable to resolve these tradeoffs through a structured process, forcing contentious upgrades to be negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.