Bitcoin Developer Proposes Hard Fork to Reassign Satoshi's Coins to Investors

Bitcoin developer Paul Sztorc has proposed a hard fork that would reassign some of the earliest coins on the original crypto network—widely believed to belong to pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto—to investors in a new project. The co-founder and CEO of LayerTwo Labs, Sztorc announced the project, called eCash, on Friday. The plan would "manually reassign" about 500,000 of the roughly 1.1 million Bitcoin associated with the so-called "Patoshi pattern," a mining pattern some researchers believe is linked to Nakamoto. "This will no doubt be a controversial decision," Sztorc wrote on X. "But I think it is necessary, and in fact, ideal." Sztorc would not (and could not) move the Satoshi-linked coins on Bitcoin itself. Instead, eCash would create a separate blockchain that copies Bitcoin's history and changes the ledger to assign all but 600K of those coins to new owners. Current on-chain Bitcoin (BTC) holders would also receive coins on the eCash network equivalent to their holdings at the time of the fork. "Your coins will split. For example, if you have 4.19 BTC, then you will get 4.19 eCash," he wrote on X. "You may sell your eCash—or keep it. Or ignore it!" Named after the original eCash, cryptographer David Chaum's early digital money project, the new fork is a callback to one of crypto's earliest ideas. The original eCash used cryptographic "blind signatures" to let people make private electronic payments, but DigiCash, Chaum's company developing the project, filed for bankruptcy in 1998 after the project failed to gain widespread adoption. "It's not Satoshi's Bitcoin, it's just [unspent transaction outputs] that are presumed to belong to Satoshi that are being cloned and modified onto a completely different network," Bitcoin developer and Casa Chief Security Officer Jameson Lopp told Decrypt. Lopp dismissed the move as a publicity stunt, calling it "clever outrage marketing." According to Loop, such a reassignment could only happen on Bitcoin itself if the broader network of developers agreed to adopt the fork. "If the entire Bitcoin ecosystem decided to migrate to a hard fork that reassigned Satoshi's coins to keys that other people controlled, then sure, it's theoretically possible," Lopp said. Sztorc has said the reassignment would allow early supporters to invest in the project before its planned August launch. He has argued the move is needed to keep the chain from becoming a "zombie" project without enough capital or contributors. Bitcoin has split before. Bitcoin Cash launched in 2017 after a dispute over scaling, splitting off and creating a new network. Ethereum split in 2016 after the DAO hack, with most network backers choosing to reverse the transactions with stolen funds while Ethereum Classic kept the original chain. Both Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC) have been far less valuable and popular than their respective original coins and networks. The eCash website says the chain is expected to launch in about 119 days and will include "Drivechain" scaling network support, with seven sidechains in development. "The upside is enormous: global scalability, privacy, competition, rapid improvement, and adoption," Sztorc wrote on the eCash website. "In fact, it may be a matter of life or death for Bitcoin. The downside is small: some drama, plus every Bitcoiner gets some free money."