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

Earlier this week, Bitcoin's core developers proposed a plan to protect 8 million coins from quantum attacks. However, Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, believes this solution is still insufficient to safeguard coins belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto. In a video posted on his YouTube channel, Hoskinson argued that Bitcoin's proposed defense mechanism is both technically incorrect and structurally unable to protect the network's oldest coins, including the roughly 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. He stated that BIP-361, a proposal to phase 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. 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. The BIP-361 proposal suggests that users with frozen quantum-vulnerable funds could reclaim them by constructing a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase. However, Hoskinson argued that this approach cannot 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. 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. 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.