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 solution to protect against quantum attacks by freezing 8 million coins. However, according to Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, this solution is still insufficient to safeguard the coins belonging to the network's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Hoskinson expressed his concerns in a video posted on his YouTube channel, stating that the proposed defense mechanism is both technically incorrect and structurally flawed. He believes that BIP-361, the proposal aimed at phasing out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, is being misrepresented as a soft fork when it would actually require a hard fork due to its invalidation of existing signature schemes. This distinction is crucial, as Bitcoin's development community has traditionally been opposed to hard forks, viewing them as a violation of the network's immutability. Hoskinson argued that the proposal's reliance on zero-knowledge proofs tied to BIP-39 seed phrases would not be able to recover approximately 1.7 million bitcoins that predate the introduction of BIP-39 in 2013, including those associated with Satoshi's early mining activities. These early coins were generated using a different key derivation method, which would make it impossible for their owners to provide the necessary cryptographic proof to reclaim them. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has acknowledged that the proposal is not a finalized specification and expressed his hope that it would never need to be adopted. 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, leading to contentious upgrades being negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.