Charles Hoskinson Criticizes Bitcoin's Quantum Solution as Insufficient to Rescue Satoshi's Coins

A recent proposal by Bitcoin's core developers to freeze 8 million coins in order to protect against quantum attacks has been met with skepticism by Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, who believes it will not be enough to safeguard the coins owned by the network's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, according to a video posted on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson argues that the proposed solution, BIP-361, is both technically flawed and structurally incapable of protecting the network's oldest coins, including the approximately 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi. He claims that BIP-361, which aims to phase out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, is being misrepresented as a soft fork when it would actually require a hard fork, as it would invalidate existing signature schemes that users are currently relying on. A hard fork is a significant change to the network's protocol that would require all users to upgrade their software, whereas a soft fork is a less invasive change that would still allow old software to work, albeit without access to new features. The BIP-361 proposal suggests that users with frozen funds could recover them by creating a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase, but Hoskinson argues that this approach would not work for approximately 1.7 million bitcoin that were generated before the introduction of BIP-39 in 2013, including the 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 recover them. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has acknowledged that the proposal is not ideal and hopes it will never need to be adopted, 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 makes it difficult for the network to resolve tradeoffs and negotiate upgrades through a structured process, instead relying on developer mailing lists and social pressure.