Charles Hoskinson Claims Bitcoin's Quantum Solution is a Hard Fork that Cannot Protect Satoshi's Coins

Earlier this week, Bitcoin's core developers proposed a plan to freeze around 8 million coins to shield against quantum attacks. However, according to a video posted by Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, on his YouTube channel, this plan is still insufficient to protect the coins belonging to the network's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Hoskinson asserts that Bitcoin's proposed defense mechanism against quantum computers is both technically inaccurate and structurally incapable of safeguarding the network's oldest coins, including the roughly 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi. He argues that the BIP-361 proposal, which aims to phase out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, is misleadingly presented as a soft fork when it would actually require a hard fork due to its invalidation of existing signature schemes. Hoskinson emphasized that a hard fork is necessary to implement this change, which is a significant distinction given Bitcoin's historical opposition to hard forks. The BIP-361 proposal suggests using zero-knowledge proofs tied to BIP-39 seed phrases to reclaim frozen funds, but Hoskinson claims this approach is inadequate for approximately 1.7 million bitcoin that predate the introduction of BIP-39 in 2013, including those associated with Satoshi's early mining activities. These early coins were generated using a different key derivation method and would remain permanently frozen if the proposal is implemented in its current form. Jameson Lopp, the core developer behind BIP-361, has expressed his reservations about the proposal, describing it as a contingency plan rather than a finalized specification. 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 these tradeoffs through a structured process.