Bitcoin Core developers earlier this week proposed freezing 8 million Bitcoins to defend against quantum attackers.
But Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson posted a video on his YouTube channel late Wednesday arguing that it still cannot save coins belonging to the network’s anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Hoskinson said Bitcoin’s proposed defenses against quantum computers are 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, a proposal by developer Jameson Lopp and others to phase out quantum-fragile Bitcoin addresses, came in the form of a soft fork but functionally required a hard fork because it invalidated existing signature schemes that users actively relied on.
“To actually do that, you need a hard fork,” Hoskinson said. This distinction is important because Bitcoin’s development culture has historically opposed hard forks, arguing that they violate the immutability of the network. The BIP-361 authors described the proposal as a soft fork, a characterization Hoskinson called a lie.
Soft forks tighten the rules so old software still works, but new features cannot be used. A hard fork changes the rules so fundamentally that old software stops working entirely and the network fragments unless everyone upgrades.
BIP-361 proposes that users with frozen quantum-fragile funds can recover those funds by constructing a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase, a standard for generating wallet keys from recoverable phrases.
Hoskinson believes that this approach cannot save the approximately 1.7 million Bitcoins that existed before the launch of BIP-39 in 2013, including approximately 1 million Bitcoins associated with Satoshi Nakamoto’s early mining activities.
These early coins were generated using a different key derivation method than the original Bitcoin wallet software, which relied on a local key pool rather than a deterministic seed.
There is no seed phrase to prove knowledge, which means that zero-knowledge recovery schemes built on this assumption cannot return access to the holder.
“1.7 million coins can’t do that. It’s impossible. 1.1 million of them belong to Satoshi Nakamoto,” Hoskinson said.
If the proposal passes in its current form, these tokens will be permanently frozen regardless of whether their original owners attempt to migrate, as migration requires cryptographic proof that they cannot provide.
Core developer Jameson Lopp, co-author of BIP-361, admitted in a post on X this week that he dislikes the proposal and hopes it never needs to be adopted, describing it as a “rough idea for a contingency plan” rather than a final specification.
Lopp believes that it is better to freeze dormant Bitcoins (of which he estimates there are 5.6 million Bitcoins) than to allow future quantum attackers to recover and dump them on the market.
Hoskinson’s broader criticism goes beyond technical details. He believes that Bitcoin’s lack of formal on-chain governance prevents the network from resolving these trade-offs through a structured process, forcing contentious upgrades to be negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.
