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

Earlier this week, Bitcoin's core developers proposed a plan to freeze 8 million coins in order to defend against potential quantum attacks. However, according to Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, this plan is still insufficient to protect the coins owned by the network's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, as stated in a video on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson believes that the proposed defense mechanism against quantum computers is both technically incorrect and structurally incapable of safeguarding the network's oldest coins, including the approximately 1 million bitcoin attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. He claims that the BIP-361 proposal, which aims to phase out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, is being misrepresented as a soft fork when it would actually require a hard fork due to its invalidation of existing signature schemes. Hoskinson emphasized that "to actually do this, you need a hard fork," highlighting the distinction between soft and hard forks, which is crucial given Bitcoin's historical opposition to hard forks. A soft fork tightens the rules, allowing old software to still work but not utilize new features, whereas a hard fork changes the rules so fundamentally that old software stops working entirely, potentially causing the network to split 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 necessary cryptographic proof to migrate their coins. If the proposal is implemented in its current form, those coins would remain permanently frozen. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has expressed his dissatisfaction with the proposal, describing it as a rough idea for a contingency plan rather than a finalized specification. Lopp estimates that freezing dormant coins, approximately 5.6 million bitcoin, 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, forcing contentious upgrades to be negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.