Not a theft, but a statement: Inside the Bitcoin proposal to reassign Satoshi-linked coins

Paul Sztorc is not trying to move Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin.

That is the narrow fact getting lost in the backlash around eCash, a proposed Bitcoin fork scheduled for August at block height 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 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.”

But Satoshi's untouched holdings function as Bitcoin's foundational guarantee, the proof that even the network's creator never moved his coins because the rules apply to everyone equally. Selling claims on a forked-chain version of those holdings to fund a new project is the part that reads as theft, even when no theft is technically occurring.

That turns the dispute into a property-rights fight, even if the property exists only on a new chain.

“Bitcoin was created to preserve and protect inviolable property rights for everybody on earth,” Beau Turner, CEO of mining firm 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 misstep that it’s 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 restrict old quantum-vulnerable coins, including addresses believed to belong to Satoshi. Those debates put dormant balances, immutability and social intervention back at the center of Bitcoin culture.