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

Recently, Bitcoin's core developers suggested freezing 8 million coins as a defense mechanism against quantum attacks. However, Cardano's founder, Charles Hoskinson, believes this approach will not be able to protect the coins belonging to the network's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, as stated in a video on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson argues that the proposed quantum defense is both technically incorrect and structurally incapable of safeguarding the network's oldest coins, including the approximately 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi. He claims that BIP-361, a proposal aimed at phasing 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. The distinction between a soft and hard fork is crucial, as Bitcoin's development culture has historically opposed hard forks. A soft fork allows old software to continue working, albeit without access to new features, whereas a hard fork changes the rules so fundamentally that old software becomes obsolete and the network splits unless all users upgrade. BIP-361 proposes that users with frozen quantum-vulnerable funds could reclaim them by creating a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase. Nevertheless, Hoskinson contends that this approach will not be able to rescue around 1.7 million bitcoin that predate BIP-39's introduction 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, which relied on a local key pool rather than a deterministic seed, making it impossible for their owners to provide the necessary cryptographic proof to migrate them. If the proposal is adopted in its current form, these coins will remain permanently frozen. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has expressed his dislike for the proposal, describing it as a rough idea for 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, resulting in contentious upgrades being negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.