Charles Hoskinson Criticizes Bitcoin's Quantum Computing Fix, Claims It Won't Protect Satoshi's Coins

Earlier this week, Bitcoin's core developers suggested freezing 8 million coins to defend against quantum attacks. However, Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, believes this proposal will not be able to protect the network's oldest coins, including those attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. Hoskinson argues that BIP-361 is being misrepresented as a soft fork, when in reality it would require a hard fork due to its impact on existing signature schemes. He claims that the proposed solution, which involves phasing out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, would invalidate existing signature schemes that users are currently relying on. A hard fork is necessary to implement this change, according to Hoskinson. The BIP-361 proposal suggests that users with frozen funds could reclaim them by creating a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase. However, Hoskinson argues that this approach will not work for approximately 1.7 million bitcoin that predate 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. As a result, the original owners of these coins would be unable to provide the necessary cryptographic proof to migrate their funds, even if the proposal is passed. 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. Lopp argues 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 makes it difficult to resolve these tradeoffs through a structured process.