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

Earlier this week, Bitcoin's core developers suggested freezing 8 million coins to shield against quantum attacks. However, Cardano's Charles Hoskinson believes this measure will not safeguard coins belonging to the network's anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, as stated in a video on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson asserts that Bitcoin's proposed defense mechanism against quantum computers is both technically and structurally flawed, making it incapable of protecting the network's oldest coins, including the roughly 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi. He argues that BIP-361, a proposal aimed at phasing 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. This distinction is crucial, as Bitcoin's development culture has historically opposed hard forks, viewing them as a breach of the network's immutability. The proposal's authors have described it as a soft fork, a characterization Hoskinson disputes. A soft fork typically involves tightening the rules, allowing old software to remain functional but unable to utilize new features, whereas a hard fork fundamentally alters the rules, causing old software to become obsolete and potentially splitting the network unless all users upgrade. BIP-361 proposes that users with frozen quantum-vulnerable funds could reclaim them by creating a zero-knowledge proof linked to their BIP-39 seed phrase. However, Hoskinson argues that this approach is ineffective for 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 activities. These early coins were generated using a different key derivation method, relying on a local key pool rather than a deterministic seed, making 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, regardless of any attempts by their original owners to migrate them. Jameson Lopp, a core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has expressed his dissatisfaction with the proposal, describing it as a rough contingency plan rather than a finalized specification. Lopp argues that freezing dormant coins would be preferable to allowing a future quantum attacker to recover and dump them on the market. Hoskinson's criticism extends beyond the technical aspects, asserting that Bitcoin's lack of formal on-chain governance hinders the network's ability to resolve these tradeoffs through a structured process, forcing contentious upgrades to be negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.