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 suggested freezing 8 million coins to shield against quantum attacks. However, Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, believes this measure will not suffice to safeguard the coins belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto, as stated in a video posted on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson argues that Bitcoin's proposed defense against quantum computers is both technically incorrect and structurally incapable of protecting the network's earliest coins, including the roughly 1 million Bitcoin attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. He claims that BIP-361, a proposal aimed at phasing out quantum-vulnerable Bitcoin addresses, is being misrepresented as a soft fork when it would, in fact, require a hard fork due to its invalidation of existing signature schemes that users are actively relying on. According to Hoskinson, the distinction between a soft fork and a hard fork is crucial, as Bitcoin's development culture has historically opposed hard forks, viewing them as violations of the network's immutability. The authors of BIP-361 have described the proposal as a soft fork, a characterization Hoskinson disputes. A soft fork tightens the rules, allowing old software to continue functioning but without access to new features, whereas a hard fork changes the rules so fundamentally that old software ceases to work entirely, potentially causing the network to split unless all users upgrade. BIP-361 suggests that users with frozen quantum-vulnerable funds could reclaim them by creating a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase, a standard for generating wallet keys from a recoverable phrase. Hoskinson contends that this approach is incapable of rescuing 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. 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 is adopted in its current form, those coins would remain permanently frozen, regardless of whether their original owners attempt to migrate, because migration would require cryptographic proof they are unable to provide. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, acknowledged that he does not favor the proposal and hopes it never needs to be adopted, describing it as a rough idea for a contingency plan rather than a finalized specification. Lopp argues that freezing dormant coins, which he estimates at 5.6 million Bitcoin, 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.