'We don't take Satoshi's bitcoin': eCash fork sparks backlash over 'reassigned' coins

A planned bitcoin hard fork called "eCash," which includes a mechanism to reassign early BTC believed to be mined by Satoshi Nakamoto, is stirring debate ahead of its expected August launch.

The project's creator, LayerTwoLabs founder and CEO Paul Sztorc, said on Friday that the fork would create a new chain that mirrors bitcoin's history and give existing bitcoin holders an equivalent number of eCash.

This is similar to past bitcoin hard forks, including the 2017 split that created Bitcoin Cash, when disagreements over how to scale the network led to the fork and creation of BCH.

But while that fork primarily involved changes to the blockchain's block size, something Sztorc has called a "temporary fix," his aims for eCash build on ideas for the Bitcoin network that he has been advocating for for years. 

Sztorc is the author of BIP300/301, or "Drivechains," which he sees as a way to expand Bitcoin functionality by allowing multiple second-layer "sidechain" networks to operate alongside it. 

Despite support from early Bitcoin developers like Adam Back, the proposal, first pitched in 2017, has failed to capture broad support.

The eCash fork would essentially act as a testing ground for these features.

Satoshi's bitcoins

That said, the philosophical debate on Bitcoin's identity and function has taken a back seat to criticisms over one particular part of the fork involving coins tied to the Bitcoin network's creator, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto.

In particular, Sztorc plans to "reassign" a portion of eCash tokens based on "Patoshi pattern" coins, referencing the roughly 1.1 million BTC believed to have been mined by Satoshi Nakamoto in the network’s early days.

Sztorc said the project would only allocate 600,000 eCash to Satoshi, with the remaining 500,000 to go toward seeding the new ecosystem to avoid what he described as a "zombie project" problem, where forks struggle to attract contributors before launch.

There was no further breakdown of how those coins would be distributed beyond indicating that a portion would go to early "investors" in the project.

Sztorc pushed back in a follow-up X post on Monday, saying the fork does not touch any existing bitcoin balances.

"We do not take any of Satoshi’s BTC," he wrote. "We gift Satoshi 600,000 eCash … BTC balances are untouched by eCash."

He added that many of the earliest coins are likely abandoned, pointing to their lack of movement over more than a decade, and argued that critics were overstating the implications.

The Block reached out to Sztorc for comment.

"It is fun to virtue signal about property rights," Sztorc said, adding that information circulating "in the heat of the moment" may not be reliable.