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

Earlier this week, Bitcoin's core developers suggested freezing 8 million coins to safeguard against quantum attacks. However, according to a video posted by Charles Hoskinson on his YouTube channel, this plan is still unable to protect the network's oldest coins, including the roughly 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. Hoskinson believes that BIP-361, the proposal aimed at phasing out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, is being misleadingly presented as a soft fork when it would actually require a hard fork due to its impact on existing signature schemes. A hard fork would be necessary to implement this change, which Hoskinson claims would invalidate the existing rules that users rely on. This is significant because Bitcoin's development community has historically been opposed to hard forks, viewing them as a threat to the network's immutability. The proposal's authors have described it as a soft fork, a characterization that Hoskinson disputes. A soft fork would tighten the rules, allowing old software to continue functioning but without access to new features, whereas a hard fork would change the rules so fundamentally that old software would cease to work, potentially leading to a network split unless all users upgrade. BIP-361 proposes 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 is insufficient to rescue the 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 and would remain permanently frozen if the proposal passes in its current form. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has expressed his own reservations about the proposal, describing it as a rough idea rather than a finalized specification. 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 criticism extends beyond the technical details, arguing that Bitcoin's lack of formal on-chain governance hinders the network's ability to resolve tradeoffs through a structured process, forcing contentious upgrades to be negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.