Cardano Founder Disputes Bitcoin's Quantum Computing Fix, Says it Won't Save Early Coins

Earlier this week, Bitcoin's core developers suggested a plan to freeze 8 million coins to protect against quantum attacks. However, according to Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, this proposal won't be enough 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 mislabeled and incapable of protecting the network's oldest coins. He believes that BIP-361, which aims to phase out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, is being incorrectly presented as a soft fork when it would actually require a hard fork due to its impact on existing signature schemes. Hoskinson emphasized that a hard fork is necessary to implement this change, which contradicts 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. However, Hoskinson argued that this approach won't work for approximately 1.7 million bitcoin that predate the introduction of BIP-39 in 2013, including the coins associated with Satoshi's early mining activity. These early coins were generated using a different key derivation method and would remain permanently frozen if the proposal passes in its current form. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has acknowledged that the proposal is not ideal and hopes it never needs to be adopted. Hoskinson's criticism extends beyond the technical details, arguing that Bitcoin's lack of formal on-chain governance makes it difficult to resolve these tradeoffs through a structured process.