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 to defend against quantum attacks. However, Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, believes this solution is still insufficient to protect the coins belonging to the network's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, as stated in a video on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson claims that Bitcoin's proposed defense against quantum computers is both technically mislabeled and structurally incapable of safeguarding the network's oldest coins, including the approximately 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. He argues that the BIP-361 proposal, which aims to phase out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, is being incorrectly presented as a soft fork when it would actually require a hard fork due to its invalidation of existing signature schemes. 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. A soft fork tightens the rules, allowing old software to still work but not utilize new features, whereas a hard fork changes the rules fundamentally, causing old software to stop working entirely and potentially splitting the network unless all users upgrade. The BIP-361 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 is unable to rescue 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 passes in its current form. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has expressed his reluctance towards the proposal, describing it as a rough idea for a contingency plan rather than a finalized specification. Hoskinson's critique extends beyond the technical details, 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.