Cardano Founder Claims Bitcoin's Quantum Solution is a Hard Fork That Won't Rescue Satoshi's Coins

Recently, Bitcoin's core developers suggested freezing 8 million coins as a defense mechanism against quantum attacks. However, Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, believes this approach will not be able to protect the coins belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto, the network's pseudonymous creator, as stated in a video on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson argues that the proposed solution, BIP-361, is both technically incorrect and structurally flawed in its ability to safeguard the network's oldest coins, including the approximately 1 million bitcoins attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. He claims that BIP-361, which aims to phase 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. Hoskinson emphasizes that a hard fork is necessary to implement this change, which is significant because Bitcoin's development culture has traditionally been opposed to hard forks, viewing them as violations of the network's immutability. The BIP-361 proposal suggests that users with frozen quantum-vulnerable funds could recover them by creating a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase. Nevertheless, Hoskinson argues that this method will not be able to recover approximately 1.7 million bitcoins that predate the introduction of BIP-39 in 2013, including the roughly 1 million coins associated with Satoshi's early mining activities. 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 that they are unable to provide. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has acknowledged that he does not like the proposal and hopes it will never need 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 bitcoins, 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.