Bitcoin’s top developers proposed earlier this week freezing 8 million coins to defend against quantum attacks.
But Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson believes he still can’t hold coins belonging to the network’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, according to a video posted to his YouTube channel on Wednesday night.
Hoskinson said Bitcoin’s proposed defense against quantum computers is technically mislabeled and structurally incapable of protecting the network’s oldest coins, including the roughly 1 million bitcoins attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto.
He argued that BIP-361, the proposal by developer Jameson Lopp and others to phase out vulnerable quantum bitcoin addresses, is presented as a soft fork but would functionally require a hard fork because it overrides existing signing schemes that users actively trust.
“To actually do this, you need a hard fork,” Hoskinson said. The distinction is important because Bitcoin’s development culture has historically opposed hard forks, viewing them as violations of the network’s immutability. The authors of BIP-361 have described the proposal as a soft fork, a characterization Hoskinson called a lie.
A soft fork tightens the rules so that old software still works but can’t use the new features. A hard fork changes the rules so fundamentally that old software stops working entirely and the network splits unless everyone upgrades.
BIP-361 suggests that users with frozen vulnerable quantum funds could claim them by constructing a zero-knowledge proof linked to their BIP-39 seed phrase, a standard for generating wallet keys from a recoverable phrase.
Hoskinson argued that this approach cannot rescue approximately 1.7 million bitcoins prior to the introduction of BIP-39 in 2013, including approximately 1 million coins associated with Satoshi’s initial mining activity.
Those first coins were generated using a different key derivation method than the original Bitcoin wallet software, which was based on a local set of keys rather than a deterministic seed.
There is no seed phrase to prove knowledge, which means that no zero-knowledge retrieval scheme built on that assumption can return access to the possessors.
“1.7 million coins can’t do that. It’s not possible. 1.1 million of which belong to Satoshi,” Hoskinson said.
If the proposal is approved in its current form, those coins would remain permanently frozen regardless of whether their original owners ever attempt to migrate, because migration would require cryptographic proof that they cannot provide.
Jameson Lopp, the lead developer and co-author of BIP-361, acknowledged in a post on
Lopp has argued that freezing dormant coins, which he estimates at 5.6 million bitcoins, would be preferable to allowing a future quantum attacker to recover them and dump them on the market.
Hoskinson’s broader criticism extends beyond technical details. He argues that Bitcoin’s lack of formal on-chain governance leaves the network unable to resolve these trade-offs through a structured process, forcing controversial updates to be negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.
