Cardano Founder Claims Bitcoin's Quantum Solution is a Hard Fork That Fails to Protect Satoshi's Coins

Earlier this week, Bitcoin's core developers suggested freezing 8 million coins as a defense mechanism against quantum attacks. However, Cardano's founder, Charles Hoskinson, expressed his skepticism in a video posted on his YouTube channel, stating that this solution would still be unable to protect the coins belonging to the network's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Hoskinson argued that the proposed defense, BIP-361, 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. He emphasized that BIP-361 would require a hard fork, as it would invalidate existing signature schemes that users are currently relying on. This is significant because Bitcoin's development culture has traditionally opposed hard forks, viewing them as a breach of the network's immutability. The BIP-361 authors have described the proposal as a soft fork, a characterization that Hoskinson disputes. A soft fork would tighten the rules, allowing old software to still work but not utilize new features, whereas a hard fork would change the rules fundamentally, causing old software to stop working entirely and potentially splitting the network unless all users upgrade. BIP-361 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 argued that this approach would be ineffective for approximately 1.7 million bitcoin that predate BIP-39's introduction 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. If the proposal passes in its current form, those coins would remain permanently frozen, regardless of whether their original owners attempt to migrate, as migration would require cryptographic proof they are unable to provide. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, acknowledged that he does not like the proposal and hopes it never needs to be adopted, describing it as a rough idea for a contingency plan rather than a finalized specification. Lopp has argued that freezing dormant coins 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.