Cardano's Charles Hoskinson Claims Bitcoin's Quantum Solution Is a Hard Fork That Won't Rescue Satoshi's Coins

Bitcoin's core developers recently proposed a plan to freeze 8 million coins to protect against quantum attacks. However, Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, believes this plan is still insufficient to safeguard coins belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto, the network's pseudonymous creator, as stated in a recent YouTube video. Hoskinson argues that Bitcoin's proposed defense against quantum computers is both technically mislabeled and structurally incapable of protecting the network's oldest coins, including the approximately 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. He claims that the proposal, BIP-361, which aims to phase out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, is being misleadingly presented as a soft fork when it would actually require a hard fork due to its invalidation of existing signature schemes that users are currently relying on. A hard fork is necessary because it changes the rules so fundamentally that old software stops working entirely, and the network splits unless everyone upgrades. The 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. If the proposal passes in its current form, those coins would remain permanently frozen regardless of whether their original owners ever attempt to migrate, because migration would require cryptographic proof they are unable to provide. 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 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.