Cardano Founder Disputes Bitcoin's Quantum Solution, Claims It Won't Protect Satoshi's Coins

Earlier this week, Bitcoin's core developers suggested freezing 8 million coins to shield against quantum attacks. However, Cardano's founder, Charles Hoskinson, believes this strategy will still fail to safeguard coins owned by the network's mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, as stated in a video on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson claims that Bitcoin's proposed defense mechanism against quantum computers is both technically misclassified and structurally incapable of protecting the network's oldest coins, including the roughly 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. He asserts that BIP-361, a proposal to phase out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, is being misrepresented as a soft fork when it would, in fact, require a hard fork due to the invalidation of existing signature schemes that users are actively relying on. A hard fork is necessary, according to Hoskinson, because it alters the rules so fundamentally that old software stops working entirely and the network splits unless everyone upgrades. The BIP-361 proposal suggests that users with frozen quantum-vulnerable funds could reclaim them by constructing a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase. However, Hoskinson argues that this approach cannot rescue approximately 1.7 million bitcoin that predate BIP-39's introduction 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 from the original Bitcoin wallet software, which relied on a local key pool rather than a deterministic seed. As a result, if the proposal passes in its current form, those coins would remain permanently frozen regardless of whether their original owners ever attempt to migrate. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has expressed his dislike for the proposal, describing it as a rough idea for a contingency plan 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 broader critique extends beyond the technical details, arguing that Bitcoin's lack of formal on-chain governance leaves the network unable to resolve these tradeoffs through a structured process, forcing contentious upgrades to be negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.