Cardano Founder Disagrees with Bitcoin's Quantum Solution, Claims it Won't Protect Satoshi's Holdings

Earlier this week, Bitcoin's core developers suggested a plan to protect the network from quantum attacks by freezing 8 million coins. However, Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, believes that this plan is technically flawed and won't be able to safeguard the coins owned by Bitcoin's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Hoskinson argues that BIP-361, the proposal to phase out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, is being misleadingly presented as a soft fork when it actually requires a hard fork. This distinction is crucial as Bitcoin's development culture has traditionally opposed hard forks, viewing them as a breach of the network's immutability. 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 claims that this approach won't work for approximately 1.7 million bitcoins that were created before 2013, including the 1 million coins associated with Satoshi's early mining activities. These early coins were generated using a different key derivation method, which relied on a local key pool rather than a deterministic seed. As a result, if the proposal is implemented 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 goes beyond the technical aspects, arguing that Bitcoin's lack of formal on-chain governance makes it challenging to resolve tradeoffs through a structured process, leading to contentious upgrades being negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.