Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has gone on record calling Bitcoin’s proposed quantum defense both technically mislabeled and functionally inadequate. The detail most outlets are missing: roughly 1.7 million BTC may be beyond saving, no matter what developers vote through. This is all happening when Bitcoin price prediction is getting bullish.
In a video posted to his YouTube channel late Wednesday, Hoskinson dissected BIP-361, the proposal from developer Jameson Lopp and others to phase out quantum-vulnerable Bitcoin addresses. He says that BIP-361 is being marketed as a soft fork but would functionally require a hard fork, since it invalidates existing signature schemes that active users currently rely on.
“To actually do this, you need a hard fork,” Hoskinson said flatly.
He called the soft fork characterization a lie. Bitcoin’s development culture has historically treated hard forks as violations of the network’s immutability, which makes the political fallout as significant as the technical one. The broader quantum security debate has been intensifying across the industry for months.
The deeper problem sits in the recovery mechanism. BIP-361 proposes that users with frozen quantum-vulnerable funds could reclaim them via a zero-knowledge proof tied to a BIP-39 seed phrase. According to Hoskinson, approximately 1.7 million BTC, including the estimated ~1 million coins attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto, predate BIP-39’s 2013 introduction entirely. No BIP-39 seed phrase exists for those wallets.
The zero-knowledge recovery path simply doesn’t apply. Satoshi’s coins, by this analysis, are structurally unrecoverable under the current proposal regardless of how the fork resolves.
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Bitcoin Price Prediction: Fork or no Fork, $250,000 the Target
Hoskinson’s skepticism about Bitcoin’s protocol governance hasn’t dampened his price outlook. He publicly predicted BTC reaches $250,000 by mid-2026, a 3X from current levels, citing institutional inflows, Magnificent 7 tech integration, the incoming Clarity Act, and sustained end-user growth as primary drivers. He reiterated the forecast in a Bloomberg interview at TOKEN2049 Singapore.
Technically, Bitcoin’s current position at just under $74,000 reflects a meaningful recovery from the sub-$66,000 low due to the fear of an Iran war. Early this month, the peak stood at $73,000; BTC has now cleared that level convincingly. Analyst consensus has been steadily repricing upward as macro headwinds ease.
The quantum debate is a wildcard that existing price models don’t price cleanly. If BIP-361 stalls, or forces a hard fork, short-term volatility is the near-certain outcome.
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Bitcoin is Getting Forked, Hyper is Here to Fix
Bitcoin’s limitations are precisely what’s fueling conviction in the layer-2 thesis right now. To be back to $120,000+ high, BTC’s upside requires institutional scale, an asymmetric early-stage return that individual traders once found in spot BTC is largely gone.
Bitcoin Hyper ($HYPER) is positioning directly inside that gap. It’s the first Bitcoin Layer 2 integrating the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), delivering faster smart contract execution than Solana itself while preserving Bitcoin’s underlying security.
The project has raised $32 million at a current presale price of $0.0136, with a high 36% APY staking already live. Key infrastructure includes a Decentralized Canonical Bridge for BTC transfers and extremely low-latency transaction processing, addressing Bitcoin’s three core bottlenecks simultaneously: slow speed, high fees, and zero programmability.
The presale has been gaining traction precisely as the Bitcoin protocol debate raises questions about the base layer’s adaptability.
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