Cardano Founder Critiques Bitcoin’s Proposed Quantum Defense Upgrade

The founder of Cardano has expressed concerns about a proposed Bitcoin upgrade intended to defend against quantum computing threats. He argued that the upgrade, which is presented as a soft fork, would effectively require a hard fork due to its impact on existing signature schemes.

This upgrade plan includes a zero-knowledge recovery mechanism that depends on users proving ownership of their coins through a seed phrase standard introduced in 2013.

7 million bitcoins mined before 2013, including about 1 million associated with Bitcoin’s early mining activity, do not have this seed phrase and therefore cannot be recovered using this method. He stated that if the proposal is adopted as currently written, these early coins would remain permanently inaccessible, regardless of whether their owners attempt to migrate them.

This is because the cryptographic proofs required for migration are unavailable for those coins.

The proposal’s authors have described it as a soft fork, which typically tightens network rules without invalidating old software. The Cardano founder disagreed with this characterization, stating that the changes would invalidate existing signature schemes and thus constitute a hard fork, which historically Bitcoin’s development community has avoided.

The upgrade plan also includes freezing approximately 8 million coins to protect against quantum attacks.

One of the developers involved in the proposal has acknowledged that it is a contingency plan rather than a finalized specification and expressed hope that it will not need to be adopted. Beyond the technical aspects, the Cardano founder raised concerns about Bitcoin’s lack of formal on-chain governance.

He suggested that this absence complicates the resolution of contentious protocol upgrades, which are instead managed through informal developer discussions and social consensus.