Cardano Founder Claims Bitcoin's Quantum Solution is a Hard Fork that Fails to Protect Satoshi's Coins

In response to Bitcoin core developers' proposal to freeze 8 million coins as a defense against quantum attacks, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson expressed his skepticism in a YouTube video, stating that the plan is technically flawed and incapable of protecting the network's earliest coins, including the roughly 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. Hoskinson contends that BIP-361, the proposal aimed at phasing out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, is mislabeled as a soft fork, as it would require a hard fork due to its invalidation of existing signature schemes. He emphasized that this distinction is crucial, given Bitcoin's historical opposition to hard forks, which are viewed as violations of the network's immutability. 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 is ineffective for the approximately 1.7 million bitcoin that predate BIP-39's introduction 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 for migration. 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. Hoskinson's critique extends beyond the technical aspects, arguing that Bitcoin's lack of formal on-chain governance hinders the network's ability to resolve tradeoffs through a structured process, leading to contentious upgrades being negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.