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

Earlier this week, Bitcoin's core developers suggested freezing 8 million coins to defend against quantum attacks. However, according to a video posted on his YouTube channel, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson believes this solution cannot safeguard the coins belonging to the network's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Hoskinson claims that Bitcoin's proposed defense against quantum computers is both technically incorrect and structurally incapable of protecting the network's oldest coins, including the roughly 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. He argues that the BIP-361 proposal, which aims to phase out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, is being misrepresented as a soft fork but would functionally require a hard fork due to its invalidation of existing signature schemes. A hard fork is necessary to implement this change, Hoskinson stated, emphasizing the distinction between hard and soft forks. The BIP-361 proposal suggests that users with frozen quantum-vulnerable funds could reclaim them by constructing 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 BIP-39's introduction 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, making it impossible for their owners to provide the required cryptographic proof to migrate them. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has expressed his dislike for the proposal, describing it as a rough idea for a 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 critique extends beyond the technical details, arguing that Bitcoin's lack of formal on-chain governance hinders the network's ability to resolve these tradeoffs through a structured process.