Charles Hoskinson Claims Bitcoin's Quantum Solution is a Hard Fork That Cannot Protect Satoshi's Coins

Earlier this week, Bitcoin's core developers suggested freezing 8 million coins as a defense mechanism against quantum attackers. However, Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, believes this approach is still insufficient to protect the coins owned by the network's pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, as stated in a video posted on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson asserts that Bitcoin's proposed defense against quantum computers is both technically inaccurate and structurally incapable of safeguarding the network's oldest 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 actually require a hard fork due to its invalidation of existing signature schemes that users currently rely on. According to Hoskinson, the distinction between a soft fork and a hard fork is crucial, as Bitcoin's development culture has traditionally opposed hard forks, viewing them as a violation of the network's immutability. The authors of BIP-361 have described the proposal as a soft fork, a characterization that Hoskinson disputes. A soft fork tightens the rules, allowing old software to continue functioning but without access to new features, whereas a hard fork alters the rules so fundamentally that old software ceases to work entirely, leading to a network split unless all users upgrade. BIP-361 proposes 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 is unable to 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 attempt to migrate, because migration would require cryptographic proof that they are unable to provide. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has 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.