Charles Hoskinson Claims Bitcoin's Quantum Solution is a Hard Fork That Fails to Protect 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 is still insufficient to safeguard coins owned by the network's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, as stated in a video on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson asserts that the proposed defense against quantum computers is both mislabeled and structurally flawed, making it incapable of protecting the network's oldest coins, including the roughly 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. He argues that BIP-361, a proposal aimed at phasing out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, is misleadingly presented as a soft fork when it would, in fact, require a hard fork due to its invalidation of existing signature schemes. According to Hoskinson, the distinction between a soft and hard fork is crucial, as Bitcoin's development culture has historically opposed hard forks. The proposal suggests that users with frozen funds could reclaim them by creating a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase. Nevertheless, Hoskinson claims this approach is ineffective for approximately 1.7 million bitcoin that predate BIP-39's introduction in 2013, including those associated with Satoshi's early mining activity. These early coins were generated using a different key derivation method, making it impossible for their owners to provide the necessary cryptographic proof for migration. Jameson Lopp, the core developer behind BIP-361, has expressed his dissatisfaction with the proposal, describing it as a rough idea rather than a finalized specification. Lopp believes 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.