Not a theft, but a statement: Inside the Bitcoin proposal to reassign Satoshi-linked coins
Paul Sztorc says he can’t move a single sat of Satoshi’s bitcoin and isn’t trying to. But critics say rewriting forked-chain balances at addresses a user does not control sets a bad precedent.
What to know:
- A planned August fork called eCash would copy Bitcoin’s ledger and give existing BTC holders equivalent balances on a new chain, while diverting about 500,000 forked coins attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto to early investors.
- Critics say the plan violates Bitcoin’s core ethic of inviolable property rights by reallocating Satoshi’s famously untouched holdings on the forked chain, even though it does not move any actual BTC.
- Paul Sztorc, the LayerTwo Labs CEO behind eCash and the long-stalled Drivechains proposal, frames the fork as both an alternative path and leverage on Bitcoin Core, highlighting deeper tensions over immutability, dormant coins and who can claim Bitcoin’s moral legacy.
This would follow the standard fork playbook. Bitcoin Cash did it in 2017, and Bitcoin SV followed later. Both copied Bitcoin’s ledger, changed the rules and in the hopes that the market will care.
eCash is different because of what it plans to do with Satoshi’s copied coins.
The roughly 1.1 million BTC attributed to Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto sits in dormant addresses often linked to the Patoshi pattern, an early mining fingerprint widely believed to trace back to Satoshi though never conclusively proven.
On a normal one-to-one fork, those addresses would receive roughly 1.1 million eCash. Sztorc’s plan would allocate 600,000 eCash to those addresses and redirect the remaining 500,000 eCash to investors who fund the project before launch.
Sztorc, CEO of LayerTwo Labs, pushed back on the theft framing in a Monday X post.
“We do not take any of Satoshi’s BTC,” he wrote. “BTC balances are untouched by eCash. To move BTC, you always need BTC software and the BTC private key. We lack both.”
