Cardano Founder Claims Bitcoin's Quantum Solution is a Hard Fork That Cannot Rescue Satoshi's Coins

Earlier this week, Bitcoin's core developers proposed a plan to freeze 8 million coins in an effort to protect against quantum attacks. However, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson believes this plan is still insufficient to safeguard coins owned by Bitcoin's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, as outlined in a recent video on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson argues that the proposed defense mechanism, BIP-361, is both technically mislabeled and structurally flawed, making it incapable of protecting the network's oldest coins, including the roughly 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. He claims that BIP-361, which aims to phase out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, would require a hard fork due to its invalidation of existing signature schemes that users currently rely on. This distinction is significant, as Bitcoin's development culture has traditionally opposed hard forks, viewing them as a violation of the network's immutability. The authors of BIP-361 have described the proposal as a soft fork, a characterization that Hoskinson disputes. A soft fork typically tightens the rules, allowing old software to still function, but without access to new features. In contrast, a hard fork fundamentally alters the rules, causing old software to become obsolete and potentially leading to a network split unless all users upgrade. BIP-361 suggests that users with frozen quantum-vulnerable funds could recover them by creating a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase. However, Hoskinson argues that this approach is ineffective for 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 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, regardless of whether their original owners attempt to migrate, due to the inability to provide the required cryptographic proof. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has expressed his dissatisfaction with the proposal, describing it as a rough idea for a contingency plan rather than a finalized specification. Lopp argues that freezing dormant coins, estimated to be around 5.6 million bitcoin, 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, arguing that Bitcoin's lack of formal on-chain governance hinders the network's ability to resolve tradeoffs through a structured process, forcing contentious upgrades to be negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.