Cardano's 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 suggested freezing 8 million coins to safeguard against quantum attacks. However, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson expressed his concerns that this solution would still be unable to protect the coins belonging to the network's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, in a video posted on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson believes that Bitcoin's proposed defense against quantum computers is both technically incorrect and structurally flawed, making it incapable of safeguarding the network's oldest coins, including the approximately 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. He argued that the BIP-361 proposal, which aims to phase out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, is being misleadingly presented as a soft fork when it would actually require a hard fork due to its invalidation of existing signature schemes. Hoskinson emphasized that a hard fork is necessary to implement this change, which is a significant distinction given Bitcoin's historical opposition to hard forks. The BIP-361 proposal suggests that users with frozen funds could reclaim them by creating a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase. Nevertheless, Hoskinson argued that this approach would not be able to rescue the 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, which would make it impossible for their owners to provide the necessary cryptographic proof to migrate their funds. If the proposal is adopted in its current form, these coins would remain permanently frozen. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has acknowledged that the proposal is not ideal and hopes it will never be needed. 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.