Cardano Founder Disputes Effectiveness of Bitcoin's Quantum Computing Solution

Recently, Bitcoin's core developers suggested freezing approximately 8 million coins as a defense mechanism against potential quantum attacks. However, Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, expressed his doubts about the effectiveness of this solution in protecting the network's oldest coins, including those attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto, in a video posted on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson argued that the proposed solution, known as BIP-361, is technically mislabeled and structurally flawed, requiring a hard fork rather than a soft fork due to its impact on existing signature schemes. This distinction is crucial, given Bitcoin's historical aversion to hard forks, which are viewed as violations of the network's immutability. The BIP-361 proposal involves phasing out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses and suggests that users with frozen funds could reclaim them by creating a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase. Nevertheless, Hoskinson pointed out that this approach cannot recover approximately 1.7 million bitcoins that predate the introduction of BIP-39 in 2013, including the roughly 1 million coins associated with Satoshi's early mining activities. These early coins were generated using a different key derivation method and would remain permanently frozen if the proposal is implemented in its current form. Jameson Lopp, one of the core developers behind BIP-361, has acknowledged that the proposal is not ideal and hopes it will never be necessary, describing it as a rough contingency plan rather than a finalized specification. Lopp has argued 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 aspects, arguing that Bitcoin's lack of formal on-chain governance hinders the network's ability to resolve these tradeoffs through a structured process, forcing contentious upgrades to be negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.