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 to protect against quantum attacks. However, according to Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, this plan is still insufficient to safeguard the coins owned by the network's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, as stated in a video on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson believes that the proposed defense against quantum computers, BIP-361, is both technically mislabeled and structurally incapable of protecting the network's oldest coins. He claims that BIP-361 would require a hard fork, which is a significant change to the network's rules, rather than a soft fork as proposed. A hard fork would invalidate existing signature schemes, while a soft fork would allow old software to still work, albeit without access to new features. Hoskinson also argues that the proposal's zero-knowledge proof recovery plan cannot rescue 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. This is because these early coins were generated using a different key derivation method, making it impossible for their owners to provide the necessary cryptographic proof to reclaim them. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has expressed his dissatisfaction with the proposal, describing it as a rough idea for a contingency plan rather than a finalized specification. Lopp estimates that freezing dormant coins, approximately 5.6 million bitcoin, would be a preferable solution 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 hinders the network's ability to resolve tradeoffs through a structured process, resulting in contentious upgrades being negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.