Jan3 CEO Criticizes Coinbase CEO for Interfering in Bitcoin Technical Decisions

On April 5, Jan3 CEO Samson Mow criticized Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong for once again interfering in Bitcoin technical decisions. Mow pointed out that the issues exposed by Armstrong during the block size wars a decade ago remain unresolved, highlighting his lack of humility and deep understanding of the problems at hand. Instead of analyzing and weighing options first, Armstrong tends to set opinions, action plans, and timelines prematurely. The address reuse issue at Coinbase has already made its wallet infrastructure vulnerable to quantum attacks, and it has frequently experienced outages during peak trading times, prompting Mow to suggest that Brian should ‘heal himself first.’ Mow believes that the threat from quantum computers is not yet a reality and is not expected to emerge within the next 10-20 years. Therefore, there should be no rush to switch from ECDSA/Schnorr to post-quantum signatures; rather, it is better to ‘solve it later’ to avoid greater risks. Mow outlined three major drawbacks of hastily upgrading to counter-quantum measures: first, it could expose Bitcoin to traditional computer attacks; second, post-quantum signatures are 10-125 times larger, which would significantly reduce throughput and could trigger ‘Block Size War 2.0’; third, it could become a Trojan horse, introducing RNG or cryptographic backdoors.