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 proposed a plan to freeze 8 million coins in an effort to defend against quantum attacks. However, Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, has expressed his skepticism, stating that this plan is still unable to safeguard the coins belonging to the network's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, in a video posted on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson believes that the 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 proposal, BIP-361, which aims to phase out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, is being misleadingly presented as a soft fork when it would actually require a hard fork, as it invalidates existing signature schemes that users are currently relying on. According to Hoskinson, the distinction between a soft fork and a hard fork is crucial, as Bitcoin's development culture has historically opposed hard forks, viewing them as violations of the network's immutability. 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 cannot rescue 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 from the original Bitcoin wallet software, which relied on a local key pool rather than a deterministic seed. As a result, if the proposal passes in its current form, those coins would remain permanently frozen, regardless of whether their original owners attempt to migrate. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has expressed his own reservations about the proposal, describing it as a rough idea for a contingency plan rather than a finalized specification. Hoskinson's critique extends beyond the technical details, arguing that Bitcoin's lack of formal on-chain governance leaves the network unable to resolve these tradeoffs through a structured process, forcing contentious upgrades to be negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.