Paul Sztorc isn’t trying to move Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin.
That’s the simple fact that’s been lost in the backlash around eCash, a proposed Bitcoin fork scheduled for August at 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, get 4.19 eCash.
This would follow the standard Fork playbook. Bitcoin Cash did so in 2017, and Bitcoin SV followed later. Both copied Bitcoin’s ledger, changed the rules and hoped the market would care.
eCash is different because of what it plans to do with Satoshi’s copied coins.
The approximately 1.1 million BTC attributed to Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto are in dormant addresses often linked to the Patoshi model, an early mining fingerprint widely believed to date back to Satoshi although never conclusively proven.
On a normal individual range, these addresses would receive around 1.1 million eCash. Sztorc’s plan would allocate 600,000 eCash to these addresses and redirect the remaining 500,000 eCash to investors funding the project before launch.
Sztorc, CEO of LayerTwo Labs, pushed back on the theft thesis in a Monday X article.
“We are not taking any BTC from Satoshi,” he wrote. “BTC balances are not touched by eCash. To move BTC you still need the BTC software and the BTC private key. We lack both.”
But Satoshi’s intact holdings are Bitcoin’s fundamental collateral, proof that even the network’s creator never moved his coins because the rules apply equally to everyone. Selling claims on a forked on-chain version of these holdings to finance a new project is the part that reads like theft, even when no theft technically occurs.
This turns the conflict into a struggle for ownership rights, even if ownership 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 to evolve or improve it by violating the property rights of the creator of this network is an ethical misstep so serious that it is difficult to believe it could even be considered.”
Timing makes the fight more intense. Bitcoiners have already spent recent weeks arguing over proposals to freeze or restrict 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.
This is why the fight against eCash lands in a market already prepared to treat any intervention around Satoshi-related coins as radioactive. Vijay Selvam, author of Bitcoin Principlesargued that even proposals presented as protective measures risk harming Bitcoin’s fundamental monetary promise if they set a precedent for treating dormant coins differently.
“Freezing Satoshi coins, regardless of the circumstances, sets a precedent that irreparably damages the monetary properties of Bitcoin,” Selvam wrote on
Selvam likened the issue to the durability of gold, saying bitcoin should provide similar trust across generations. “If you set a precedent for Bitcoin, you will forever kill its claim to be durable, immutable digital gold,” he wrote. “You would destroy confidence in its timeless integrity.”
Why offer eCash?
Sztorc has already spent years promoting 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 both an exit plan and a pressure tactic.
He said he would cancel it if Bitcoin activated these proposals before August. There are no signs that this will happen.
That’s why people care, even if eCash 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 managed to replace BTC. eCash can end the same way. The difference is that its launch raises a clearer question than block size ever did: Can a fork claim Bitcoin’s moral heritage while rewriting the copied chain’s most famous intact equilibrium?
