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 proposed a solution to defend against quantum attacks by freezing 8 million coins. However, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson believes this solution is still insufficient to safeguard the coins belonging to the network's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, as stated in a video on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson argues that the proposed defense, BIP-361, is both technically incorrect and structurally flawed, making it incapable of protecting the network's oldest coins, including the approximately 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi. He claims that 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. A hard fork is necessary to implement this change, according to Hoskinson, which contradicts the characterization of BIP-361 as a soft fork by its authors. The distinction between a soft fork and a hard fork is crucial, as a soft fork allows old software to continue working without using new features, whereas a hard fork changes the rules fundamentally, causing old software to stop working and potentially splitting the network unless all users upgrade. BIP-361 suggests that users with frozen quantum-vulnerable funds could recover them by creating a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase. However, Hoskinson argues that this approach is ineffective for 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 and would remain permanently frozen if the proposal is implemented in its current form. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has expressed his dislike for the proposal and views it as 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 criticism extends beyond the technical aspects, arguing that Bitcoin's lack of formal on-chain governance hinders the network's ability to resolve tradeoffs through a structured process, forcing contentious upgrades to be negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.