Jan3CEO Criticizes Coinbase CEO's Involvement in Bitcoin Technical Decisions: Lack of Deep Understanding of the Issue, Suggests Brian "Fix Himself First"

April 5: Jan3 CEO Samson Mow took aim at Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong again, criticizing him for meddling in Bitcoin technical decisions. Mow noted the issues Armstrong highlighted during the block size war a decade ago remain unchanged today. He argued Armstrong lacks humility and a deep grasp of the issues, prioritizing setting opinions, action plans, and timelines over analyzing trade-offs. Mow also pointed out Coinbase’s own address reuse problem has left its wallet infrastructure vulnerable to quantum attacks and caused frequent outages during transaction peaks—suggesting Armstrong should “fix his own house first.” Mow believes the quantum computer threat has not materialized and is not expected to do so in the next 10–20 years. Thus, there should be no rush to switch from ECDSA/Schnorr to post-quantum signatures; instead, it’s “better late than early” to avoid greater risks. He detailed three major downsides of a hasty anti-quantum upgrade: 1. It could expose Bitcoin to traditional computer attacks right now; 2. Post-quantum signatures are 10–125 times larger, significantly reducing throughput and potentially sparking “Block Size War 2.0”; 3. It may act as a Trojan horse introducing RNG or encryption backdoors.