Paul Sztorc is not trying to move Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin.
That’s the hard fact that gets lost in the reaction around eCash, a proposed Bitcoin fork scheduled for August with a block height of 964,000. The new chain would copy Bitcoin’s history up to that point, giving BTC holders an equivalent balance on the forked network. Hold 4.19 BTC and get 4.19 eCash.
This would follow the fork’s standard playbook. Bitcoin Cash did it in 2017, and Bitcoin SV did it later. They both copied the Bitcoin ledger, changed the rules, and hope the market cares.
eCash is different because of what it plans to do with the copied Satoshi coins.
The approximately 1.1 million BTC attributed to pseudonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto are located in inactive addresses often linked to the Patoshi pattern, an early mining imprint believed to date back to Satoshi, although it has never been conclusively proven.
In a normal one-to-one fork, those addresses would receive approximately 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, rejected the theft framework in a Monday X post.
“We do not accept any of Satoshi’s BTC,” he wrote. “BTC balances are not affected by eCash. To move BTC, you always need the BTC software and the BTC private key. We are missing both.”
But Satoshi’s intact holdings serve as Bitcoin’s fundamental collateral, proof that even the network’s creator never moved his coins because the rules apply to everyone equally. Selling rights to a forked chain version of those holdings to fund a new project is the part that reads as theft, even when technically no theft is taking place.
That turns the dispute into a fight over property rights, even if the property exists only 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 evolve or improve it by violating the property rights of the creator of that network is such a serious ethical error that it is difficult to believe it would even be considered.”
Timing makes the fight sharper. Bitcoiners have already spent the last few weeks arguing over proposals to freeze or restrict vulnerable old quantum currencies, including addresses believed to belong to Satoshi. Those debates put latent equilibria, immutability, and social intervention back at the center of Bitcoin culture.
That is why the fight against eCash is landing in a market that is already prepared to treat any intervention around Satoshi-linked currencies as radioactive. Vijay Selvam, author of Bitcoin Principlesargued that even proposals framed as protective measures risk damaging Bitcoin’s core monetary promise if they create a precedent for treating dormant currencies differently.
“Freezing Satoshi coins under any circumstances sets a precedent that irreparably damages the monetary properties of Bitcoin,” Selvam wrote on
Selvam compared the issue to the durability of gold, arguing that bitcoin should offer similar trust across generations. “If a precedent is set for Bitcoin, its claim to be durable, immutable digital gold will be ended forever,” he wrote. “You would destroy confidence in his eternal integrity.”
Why propose eCash?
Sztorc has spent years pushing Drivechains, a proposal that would allow developers to add sidechains to Bitcoin through the BIP300 and BIP301 proposals. The Bitcoin Core community has not agreed to adopt it, and the eCash fork now functions as an exit plan and pressure tactic.
He has said he would cancel it if Bitcoin activates those proposals before August. There are no signs that that will happen.
That’s why people care even if electronic money never becomes economically relevant. Bitcoin forks mostly fail in market terms, but they still test Bitcoin’s social assumptions.
Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV copied the ledger and continued trading, but neither came close to displacing BTC. eCash may end the same way. The difference is that its launch forces a clearer question than block size has ever raised: Can a fork claim Bitcoin’s moral inheritance while rewriting the most famously intact balance of the copied chain?
