Paul Sztorc is not trying to move Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin.
That’s the narrow fact that’s getting lost in the backlash surrounding eCash, a proposed Bitcoin fork slated for August at block height 964,000. The new chain would replicate Bitcoin’s history up to that point, giving BTC holders a corresponding balance on the disguised network. Hold 4.19 BTC, get 4.19 eCash.
This would follow the standard fork playbook. Bitcoin Cash did it in 2017 and Bitcoin SV followed later. Both copied Bitcoin’s ledger, changing the rules and hoping 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 associated with the Patoshi pattern, an early mining fingerprint widely believed to trace back to Satoshi, though it has never been conclusively proven.
In a normal one-to-one fork, these addresses will receive about 1.1 million eCash. Sztorc’s plan will allocate 600,000 eCash to these 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 are not taking any of Satoshi’s BTC,” he wrote. “BTC balances are untouched by eCash. To move BTC you always need BTC software and BTC’s private key. We lack both.”
But Satoshi’s pristine holdings serve as Bitcoin’s fundamental guarantee, the proof that even the network’s creator never moved his coins because the rules apply to everyone equally. Selling claims to a forked-chain version of those holdings to fund a new project is the part that reads like theft, even when technically no theft occurs.
That makes the dispute a property rights battle, even if the property only exists on a new chain.
“Bitcoin was created to preserve and protect the inviolable property rights of everyone on earth,” Beau Turner, CEO of mining company Abundant Mines, said in an email to CoinDesk. “Any proposal that seeks to develop or improve it by infringing on the property rights of the creator of that network is such a serious ethical misstep that it is hard to believe it would even be considered.”
The timing makes the fight sharper. Bitcoiners have already spent recent weeks arguing over proposals to freeze or limit old quantum-vulnerable coins, including addresses believed to belong to Satoshi. These debates put dormant balances, immutability and social intervention back at the center of Bitcoin culture.
That’s why the eCash fight lands in a market already ready to treat any intervention around Satoshi-linked coins as radioactive. Vijay Selvam, author of Principles of Bitcoinargued that even proposals framed as protective measures risk damaging Bitcoin’s central monetary promise if they set a precedent for treating dormant coins differently.
“Freezing Satoshi’s coins under any circumstances sets a precedent that irreparably damages Bitcoin’s monetary properties,” Selvam wrote on X. “With such a precedent, how can Bitcoiners ever feel confident that their money is safe in the distant future without feeling the need to constantly monitor the news to see if miners are going to scratch it?”
Selvam compared the issue to the durability of gold and argued that bitcoin should offer similar trust across generations. “If you set a precedent for Bitcoin, you would forever kill its claim to be durable and immutable digital gold,” he wrote. “You would destroy confidence in its timeless integrity.”
Why suggest eCash?
Sztorc previously spent years pushing Drivechains, a proposal that would let developers add sidechains to Bitcoin through proposals BIP300 and BIP301. The Bitcoin Core community has not agreed to adopt it, and the eCash fork now serves as both an exit plan and preemptive tactic.
He has said he would cancel it if Bitcoin activates these proposals before August. There is no indication that this will happen.
This is why people care even if eCash never becomes economically relevant. Bitcoin forks mostly fail market-wise, but they still test Bitcoin’s social assumptions.
Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV copied the ledger and continued to trade, but neither came close to displacing BTC. eCash can end the same way. The difference is that its launch forces a cleaner question than block size ever did: can a fork claim Bitcoin’s moral legacy while rewriting the most famous pristine balance on the copied chain?
