Charles Hoskinson Claims Bitcoin's Quantum Solution is a Hard Fork that Fails to Protect Early Coins

Earlier this week, Bitcoin's core developers proposed a plan to protect 8 million coins from quantum attacks. However, according to a video posted by Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, this plan is still insufficient to safeguard the coins belonging to the network's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Hoskinson believes that the proposed defense mechanism, BIP-361, is both technically and structurally flawed, and would require a hard fork to implement, despite being presented as a soft fork. He argues that this approach would invalidate existing signature schemes and would not be able to rescue the roughly 1.7 million bitcoins that predate the introduction of BIP-39 in 2013, including those associated with Satoshi's early mining activity. The proposal suggests that users with frozen funds could reclaim them by constructing a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase, but Hoskinson claims that this method cannot be applied to the early coins generated using a different key derivation method. If the proposal is adopted in its current form, those coins would remain permanently frozen, regardless of whether their original owners attempt to migrate. 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, leading to contentious upgrades being negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.