Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson said Bitcoin could lose its position as the largest cryptocurrency if its governance process fails to deliver the upgrades needed to address quantum-computing risks.
The issue with Bitcoin is it’s frozen in time. It’s very difficult to change anything,” Hoskinson said during an interview on The Starting Block on Friday.
Bitcoin’s resistance to rapid protocol changes helped the network survive regulatory pressure, market collapses and the disappearance of its creator, Hoskinson said. Quantum computing would present a different challenge by requiring developers, miners, node operators, exchanges, custodians and wallet providers to coordinate a migration away from vulnerable signature systems.
If Bitcoin’s governance is such that it’s impossible to actually make meaningful progress, or they compromise the core reason to use Bitcoin, I don’t think Bitcoin’s going to stay the number one cryptocurrency,” he said.
Exposed Public Keys Drive Quantum Debate
Bitcoin uses elliptic-curve cryptography to verify that transactions were authorised by the holder of a private key. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm could theoretically derive private keys from public keys already exposed onchain.
The risk is not active under current computing capabilities. The dispute centres on how early Bitcoin should prepare and what should happen to coins that remain in vulnerable addresses after a migration window.
Hoskinson previously challenged Bitcoin’s proposed quantum migration plan, arguing that restrictions on legacy signatures could permanently immobilise dormant coins whose owners do not move them.
BIP 361 proposes blocking new payments to quantum-vulnerable address types before restricting legacy ECDSA and Schnorr spends through a quantum-safe recovery process. The draft says more than 34% of Bitcoin had exposed a public key by March 1, 2026.
BIP 360 separately proposes a Pay-to-Merkle-Root output type designed to reduce long-exposure attacks by removing Taproot’s key-path spending option. Neither proposal has been activated.
Cardano Governance Shapes Hoskinson’s Argument
Hoskinson contrasted Bitcoin’s informal consensus process with Cardano’s onchain governance system, where delegated representatives, a constitutional committee and stake pool operators can vote on protocol changes.
Cardano used that structure to activate the Van Rossem hard fork on July 18, moving the network to Protocol Version 11 through its first governance-led hard fork.
With Cardano, we’re going to have to make some decisions about what to do with quantum-vulnerable infrastructure,” Hoskinson said. “If there needs to be a migration, we can have a vote, and then there could be an onchain function to do that.
Institutional Bitcoin holders are also funding technical preparations. Strategy, BlackRock, Coinbase and Fidelity Digital Assets recently joined a $15 million Bitcoin Security Consortium supporting independent developers and post-quantum cryptography research.
BIP 361 remains a draft, and Bitcoin has not approved a post-quantum signature system or a network-wide migration schedule.
