Charles Hoskinson Criticizes Bitcoin's Quantum Computing Fix, Claims It Won't Protect Satoshi's Coins

Bitcoin developers have proposed a solution to protect against quantum attacks by freezing 8 million coins. However, Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, believes this solution is insufficient to safeguard the network's oldest coins, including those attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. Hoskinson argues that the proposed solution, known as BIP-361, is being misleadingly presented as a soft fork when it would actually require a hard fork, which would invalidate existing signature schemes. He claims that this approach cannot recover approximately 1.7 million pre-2013 bitcoin, including those associated with Satoshi's early mining activity, as they were generated using a different key derivation method. If the proposal is adopted in its current form, these coins would remain permanently frozen. Hoskinson's critique extends beyond the technical aspects, arguing that Bitcoin's lack of formal on-chain governance hinders the network's ability to resolve such tradeoffs through a structured process.