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, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson expressed his skepticism in a video posted on his YouTube channel, stating that this solution would not be able to protect the coins belonging to the network's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Hoskinson argued that the proposed defense against quantum computers, as outlined in BIP-361, is both technically incorrect and structurally flawed, making it incapable of safeguarding the network's oldest coins, including the roughly 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. He claimed that BIP-361 would require a hard fork, as it would invalidate existing signature schemes that users are currently relying on. According to Hoskinson, the proposal's authors have mislabeled it as a soft fork, which he believes is a misrepresentation. A soft fork would tighten the rules, allowing old software to still work but not utilize new features, whereas a hard fork would change the rules fundamentally, causing old software to stop working entirely and potentially splitting the network unless all users upgrade. The BIP-361 proposal suggests that users with frozen quantum-vulnerable funds could reclaim them by creating a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase. However, Hoskinson argued that this approach would not be able to 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, 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. If the proposal passes in its current form, those coins would remain permanently frozen. 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. Lopp has argued 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 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.