Cardano Founder: BIP-361 Is Actually a Hard Fork, May Freeze Early BTC

TechFlow News, April 17: According to a CoinDesk report, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson stated that Bitcoin’s quantum-resistance proposal, BIP-361, has been incorrectly characterized as a soft fork; in reality, it is closer to a hard fork and would fail to protect approximately 1.7 million BTC generated before 2013—including roughly 1 million BTC attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. He explained that the zero-knowledge proof recovery mechanism outlined in the proposal relies on BIP-39 mnemonics, whereas early wallets used different key-generation methods and thus cannot produce the required proofs—rendering affected assets potentially permanently frozen under the current proposal. The report also notes that Jameson Lopp, co-author of BIP-361, described it as a rough conceptual outline for an emergency response plan rather than a finalized specification.