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 plan to freeze 8 million coins in an effort to defend against potential quantum attacks. However, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson believes this plan is still insufficient to protect the coins belonging to the network's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, as stated in a video posted on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson claims that Bitcoin's proposed defense mechanism is both technically incorrect and structurally flawed, making it incapable of safeguarding the network's oldest coins, including the roughly 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. He asserts that the BIP-361 proposal, 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. 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. 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. The BIP-361 proposal suggests that users with frozen quantum-vulnerable funds could reclaim them by creating 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, which relied on a local key pool rather than a deterministic seed, making it impossible for their owners to provide the required cryptographic proof to migrate their funds. If the proposal is implemented in its current form, these coins would remain permanently frozen, regardless of whether their original owners attempt to migrate. 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 leaves the network unable to resolve tradeoffs through a structured process, forcing contentious upgrades to be negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.