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In brief Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson says the latest Bitcoin improvement proposal won’t be able to save all the Bitcoin vulnerable to quantum computing.
The proposal would block, then freeze old coins, across three phases before a potential recovery could take place for those that missed deadlines.
Hoskinson says at least 1.7 million coins, from before 2013, would still be at risk of being stolen.
A new Bitcoin improvement proposal dubbed BIP-361 seeks to save as much as 34% of Bitcoin’s supply—or more than 7 million coins valued at $536 billion—by freezing coins that don’t migrate to quantum-resistant addresses in the future.
But Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson says it will still leave as much as 1.7 million coins, or $127 billion worth of BTC, vulnerable.
The proposal, which would play out over multiple years, is broken into three phases whereby older signature schemes on the network would be phased out. First, inflows to vulnerable addresses would be blocked, then legacy coins would be frozen, with the final phase allowing for the recovery of any Bitcoin held that missed movement deadlines.
“That’s a lie,” Hoskinson said of the final phase, claiming that 1.7 million BTC would not be recoverable under the plan. “It’s not possible.”
“You could recover some of the 8 million Bitcoin, but 1.7 million are not under this scheme,” Hoskinson said. “All of the 2013 Bitcoin and before,” he added, referring to Bitcoin held before the introduction of the key generation of BIP-39, which introduced the seed phrase.
At least 1.1 million of those coins Hoskinson pointed out belong to pseudonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakomoto, whose purported stash is believed to be worth as much as $82 billion, according to data from Arkham Intelligence.
Nevertheless, Hoskinson said “it’s not a bad proposal.”
“I understand why they wrote it,” he said. “Because if they don’t do this, that money will be stolen in the 2030s. That’s a fact.”
“Q-Day,” or the name given to the looming threat at which point quantum computers can break Bitcoin’s cryptography, has been an increasingly relevant topic of late. In March, Google issued a 2029 deadline for transitioning its infrastructure to a “post-quantum cryptography”—a high-profile sign that the quantum threat may be nearing faster than previously expected.
Though Hoskinson understood the proposal, the Cardano and Ethereum co-founder was critical of the Bitcoin community of maximalists who he believes have been unwilling to innovate or adopt features embraced by other blockchain communities.
“If you had on-chain governance, you could solve it,” Hoskinson said. “We have it at Cardano, Polkadot has it, Tezos has it—it’s a good idea.”
“But we’re shitcoiners, we don’t have good ideas,” he added with a facetious tone. “Only you guys have good ideas.”