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

Earlier this week, Bitcoin's core developers proposed a plan to freeze 8 million coins as a defense mechanism against quantum attackers. However, Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, expressed his skepticism about the proposal's ability to protect the network's oldest coins, including those attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto, in a video posted on his YouTube channel. Hoskinson believes that the proposed solution, BIP-361, is mislabeled as a soft fork and would actually require a hard fork, as it invalidates existing signature schemes. He argued that this distinction is crucial, given Bitcoin's historical opposition to hard forks. The BIP-361 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 contends that this approach is ineffective for approximately 1.7 million bitcoin that predate the introduction of BIP-39 in 2013, including the coins associated with Satoshi's early mining activities. These early coins were generated using a different key derivation method, which relied on a local key pool rather than a deterministic seed. As a result, 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 acknowledged that the proposal is not ideal and hopes it will never be necessary. 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.