Cardano Founder Disputes Bitcoin's Quantum Solution, Claims It Won't Protect Satoshi's Coins

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has expressed concerns over Bitcoin's proposed solution to defend against quantum attacks, stating that it is technically flawed and cannot rescue the network's oldest coins, including those attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. Earlier this week, Bitcoin's core developers proposed a plan to freeze 8 million coins to protect against quantum attackers. However, Hoskinson believes that this plan, known as BIP-361, is being misleadingly presented as a soft fork when it would actually require a hard fork, thereby invalidating existing signature schemes. Hoskinson argues that the proposal's zero-knowledge recovery plan is also inadequate, as it cannot reclaim 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, making it impossible for their owners to provide the necessary cryptographic proof to migrate them. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has acknowledged that the proposal is not ideal and hopes it will never be adopted, describing it as a rough idea for a contingency plan. Hoskinson's criticism 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, forcing contentious upgrades to be negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.