Satoshi's Stash Gets Grabbed in eCash Bitcoin Fork

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]A Bitcoin developer who has spent almost 10 years trying to get new features added to Bitcoin Core called Side Chains has finally decided he's tired of asking for permission. So on April 24th at the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas, Paul Stork introduced a new version of Bitcoin called ECash. This new version is set to start at block 964,000 which will happen in August. And this has major implications for anyone holding Bitcoin. So, everyone who holds Bitcoin during block 964,000 will automatically get the same amount of the new ecash on the new chain. But that's not all. Seven side chains will launch with it. These include a chain that can't be broken by quantum computers and a chain for prediction markets that Stork has been working on since 2015.

[00:00:52]However, the most controversial part is that on the new e-cash chain, about 500,000 coins believed to belong to Satoshi would be taken and given to early developers and investors. In just 2 days, the idea got more than 1.5 million views on X. Peter McCormack publicly called it stealing and disrespectful. Bitcoin maxis are demanding that STR should be ignored and shut down. His supporters are calling him the most overlooked builder in the history of Bitcoin. And now it's time to find out where you exactly stand on this as well. So today we will explain what this plan does, what it doesn't do, why calling it theft isn't a simple argument, and what every Bitcoin owner needs to know about what this means for taxes, potential security risks, and what crypto exchanges plan to do before block 964,000 arrives. My name is DC, and you're watching the Coin Bureau. To understand why this new version has caused such a huge argument, you first have to look at how it's designed. E-Cash is almost an exact copy of the main Bitcoin software using the same SHA 256D mining and it gives a one:one copy of your coins to every BTC holder at the moment it starts. So, if you have 1.34 Bitcoin at block 964,000, you will get 1.34 ecash on the new chain. A special tool will be released to help users separate their two coin balances. The code for e-cash will be frozen for 30 days before the starting block, meaning no more changes will be allowed after that time. But the way it starts is the most important technical part. The two main proposals, BIP 300, which handles money held by miners, and BIP 3001, which allows new ways of mining, are put into place using what Stor calls a core unmodified soft.

[00:02:43]This is a fancy way of saying it's a design specifically created to add sidechain features without needing the main Bitcoin developers to approve or add any single line of code. And seven of these side chains are planned to go live right at the start. Truthcoin is for prediction markets. Coin shift will be a built-in decentralized exchange.

[00:03:04]Photon is the quantum resistant chain.

[00:03:06]Bit assets is for tokenizing financial assets and NFTs. Bit names is for decentralized digital identity. Then there's a privacy chain similar to Zcash. And there's a seventh slot that hasn't been officially announced yet.

[00:03:21]Now, Bitcoin is currently worth about $77,000 with a total market value of around $1.55 trillion as I record this video. This huge value is what makes everything about this new version a big financial deal, not just an academic one. And here's the single most important thing to understand in this whole story, which almost every news source is either forgetting to say or actively hiding. The original Bitcoin is completely safe and unchanged by this plan. No actual BTC coins are moved on the original chain. No Bitcoin addresses are changed. No coins are taken, locked up, or given to someone else on the network where you currently hold your Bitcoin. The controversial coin reassignment only happens on a new chain that doesn't exist yet. You might think this difference is just a small technical detail and that calling it theft still makes sense because the new chain copies Bitcoin's history. However, that thought ignores the real deeper question behind this entire argument.

[00:04:27]The question is not whether someone is stealing your Bitcoin. No sir. The real question is whether a new chain which takes a picture of Bitcoin's ownership history is morally required to perfectly honor that ownership structure or if a new network can create its own starting rules that just happen to use an external list of owners as a reference.

[00:04:49]And that is a genuinely complicated philosophical question and arguments can be made for both sides. But it's not the same as the theft argument that is currently all over social media. Right?

[00:05:00]Confusing the two is exactly why this debate has become so pointless. And the Poshi pattern is at the heart of this entire controversy. A cryptographer named Sergio Demian Learner first spotted this pattern in 2013 by studying about 22,000 blocks mined between January 2009 and December 2010. This study suggests that a single miner or a very small very well-coordinated group created about 1.1 million Bitcoin during that time. That holding is worth about $85 billion and has remained untouched for over 15 years. The original e-cash plan would have given the addresses linked to Satoshi 600,000 e-cash on the new chain with the remaining 500,000 reassigned to early developers and investors. This was to provide money for the new system and avoid what's STR called a zombie launch. But after the huge backlash with one survey suggesting 80 to 85% opposition on X stork suggested a second version that would get rid of the coin reassignment completely. As of right now the final plan is still unconfirmed. And importantly, people like Adam Beck have questioned whether the Poshi attribution is even accurate, arguing that the chaotic early mining activity makes this whole method a guess based on statistics, not a definite proof of who owns the coins. So before you pick a side, remember that the very ownership record being argued over is based on statistical probability, not guaranteed proof. It's hard to overstate how fast the story is actually moving. Stok's team is updating documents every week.

[00:06:40]Crypto exchanges are announcing their positions very suddenly. And the technical details for some of the side chains haven't even been checked by outside security yet. So if you want to stay ahead of these developments, the Coinb Telegram channel is where we share the latest breaking analysis as it happens. The link is in the description below, or you can simply scan the QR code currently displayed on your screen.

[00:07:03]Okay. The reason this plan exists at all is a 9-year long story about how Bitcoin is managed that most holders, speculators, and quite frankly, market participants usually don't pay any attention to. The basic idea for side chains came before Strk himself. In 2014, a paper by Blockstream suggested pegged side chains. Stor introduced his idea called drivechain. in 2015, wrote the formal proposal BIP 300 in August 2017 and submitted BIP 3001 in July 2019. Crucially, his design removed the fraud proof system from the original Blockstream paper. He replaced it with a system where taking money out of a side chain requires about 13,150 approvals from miners gathered over a period of 3 to six months. This is the main technical point that has split the community for almost 10 years. In a well-known criticism from 2023, Peter Todd argued that BIP 300 replaces Bitcoin's established security model, which is based on cryptography, with what he called blind trust in miners.

[00:08:11]His specific point is that regular Bitcoin transactions are protected by digital signatures that even a majority, a 51% mining attack, can't fake. But BIP 300 replaces that unbreakable cryptographic guarantee with just a collection of proof of work from miners.

[00:08:28]Developer Kah has raised the same concern, arguing that a majority of mining power could work together to steal deposits from side chains. This creates a new and dangerous level of trust that Bitcoin has never accepted before. The core unmodified soft fork was Stor's strategic response to being rejected over and over and over again.

[00:08:49]If the main developers won't add the code, we shall simply design a way for it to start without needing their approval in the first place. Now, that mechanism itself was rejected with the core team arguing that any change that affects the main rules of Bitcoin requires broad community agreements. The request to add the code was finally closed in 2024. Major proposals like BIP 300 simply don't move forward. You see, this is the part of the story that the maximalist argument of theft completely misses. Stork is not just a random person dropping in to steal value from Bitcoin. He's a developer who has spent almost a decade following the official process for making changes. The ecash fork is the result of that process failing to produce any results. Whether you think the cautiousness of the Bitcoin core team is a good thing or an obstacle to legitimate technical work is the real debate. And that debate is not solved by simply calling STOR a thief.

[00:09:49]The seven side chains themselves are the part of the plan getting almost no serious attention and they absolutely should. The timing of the photon chain in particular deserves a very close look. On March 31st of this year, Google Quantum AI released a 57page report that dramatically changed how many quantum bits, cubits, are needed to break Bitcoin's security. Previous guesses said it would require about 9 million physical cubits. The new research suggests the same job could theoretically be done with fewer than half a million. That's about a 20 times reduction in the distance between the supercomputers we have now and a real threat to Bitcoin's encryption. Google's internal goal for moving to quantum safe systems is now 2029. That's 6 years earlier than the original 2035 date set by the US government. And on the same day, Stor announced e-cash in Las Vegas, an independent researcher cracked a small elliptic curve key using publicly available quantum hardware. You see, about 5.6 6 million BTC are currently sitting in addresses where the public key has been exposed, meaning they would be vulnerable in a fully functional quantum future. So the Photon side chain is not a random feature tacked onto the plan. It arrives in a month when the security threat level has been lowered by a factor of 10 and the response on the main Bitcoin layer faces the exact same roadblocks that stalled BIP 300 for 9 years. A side chain migration, however, completely bypasses that roadblock. But whether all seven chains will actually be ready to use by August, that's a different and very fair question. A 30-day code freeze and a public bug finding program suggest they are working hard, but launching seven completely new side chain systems at the exact same time is an incredibly tight schedule. And this is where the technical story directly hits the real world problems every Bitcoin owner needs to face because a new hard fog without strong protection against replay attacks is the biggest known danger in this entire category. The split between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic in July 2016 is the classic example of what not to do. Neither chain set up replay protection and users who moved their ETH accidentally moved their ETC at the same time until protections were added weeks later. The Bitcoin Cash fork on the other hand in August 2017 is a great example of what to do. BCH developers added a change called Sigash fork ID which put a unique ID number into the transaction signature. This made BCH transactions cryptographically invalid on the BTC chain and vice versa. The Bitcoin SV split in November 2018 is the negative case every owner should study.

[00:12:39]BSV launched without strong standard replay protection and exchanges like Bitrex stopped deposits and clearly refused to recover funds sent to the wrong chain. Individual holders lost money because the system itself had failed to prevent it. Developer Josh Ellie Thorp has already criticized the e-cash design for what he calls insufficient replay protection, describing the fork as harmful and dangerous to users in its current form.

[00:13:06]Stor has announced a coin splitter tool, but a tool that requires the user to do something is fundamentally less safe than a cryptographic guarantee built into the system itself. So for people who keep their coins in self-custody, the message is clear. Do not make any transactions on either chain immediately after the new chain starts until you have clearly separated your coins. The best way is to use new transaction outputs created after the fork block as the splitting mechanism. And for people who keep their coins on an exchange, the situation depends entirely on the exchanges public policy. As of today, no major exchange has publicly said whether they will support or reject the airdrop.

[00:13:47]That silence is important information itself and any exchange that hasn't made a decision by July should be considered unlikely to support the fork. And then there is the tax problem which is a consequence almost no owner is ready for. Under a US IRS rule from 2019, receiving cryptocurrency from a hardfork airdrop counts as regular income based on the fair market value the moment the owner gains full control over the new asset. The critical word here is can. So if your e-cash airdrop lands in a wallet address you control, the IRS says you have a taxable event the moment you can transact those coins, whether you actually want to or not. If any exchange immediately lists e-cash at any price above zero, every US holder who received the airdrop owes regular income tax at that price, even if they never touch the new asset. Centralized exchanges are now required to send out tax forms form 1099DA for the 2025 tax year, which means the income event will be reported whether the hold acknowledges it or not.

[00:14:53]Arizona has made airdrops non- taxable at the state level, but every other US state follows the federal rule and similar rules in the United Kingdom, the European Union, Canada, and Australia each have their own tax complications that holders need to check before August. The reality is that this proposal is not really one story. It is four stories happening at the same time and the maximalist arguments of theft mixes three of them into one in a way that prevents the actual debate from ever happening. The first is a technical story about whether side chains will finally come to Bitcoin after a decade of formal rejection. The second story is a governance story about whether the cautiousness of Bitcoin core has gone too far, becoming an obstacle to legitimate technical work. Then we have the ethical story about whether a new chain that copies Bitcoin's ledger can set its own starting rules or if it has a moral duty to honor the original chain's ownership claims. And lastly, it's a market story about a forced taxable event, exchange custody decisions, and security risks that affect every Bitcoin owner on the planet. The honest truth is that Stork is both a developer who has earned the right to be heard through nearly a decade of good, safe involvement, and a developer whose design removes cryptographic guarantees that critics like Peter Todd have called fundamental to Bitcoin security model. Both of these statements are true at the same time and the useful debate happens in the space between them, not at either extreme. So whatever happens at block 964,000, the questions this proposal has raised about how Bitcoin actually changes, about who is allowed to suggest changes and about whether the existing systems produces the outcomes its owners actually want are not going to disappear once August has passed. The job for every owner watching this video is simple. You have to understand the mechanics now while there is still time. Decide where you stand on the philosophical questions before social media decides it for you.

[00:16:58]And please prepare your coin storage, your exchange relationships, your tax documents before the new chain starts because the activation block doesn't care whether you have made up your mind or not. So, here is the yes or no question that every Bitcoin owner needs to answer before block 964,000 arrives. Will the e-cash fork ultimately prove STOR's argument that Bitcoin's governance has become so rigid that legitimate technical proposals need to leave the main chain to move forward? Or will the activation collapse into operational chaos due to security holes, disputes with exchanges, and a coin reassignment that the community sees as fundamental breaking of Bitcoin social contract.

[00:17:41]Please get highly opinionated in the comment section below because this is exactly the type of debate where the philosophical ground matters just as much as the technical detail. And if you want to understand exactly how the BIP 361 quantum migration plan would lock up about 6.51 million BTC if those coins are not moved to quantum resistant addresses within 5 years of it starting and why that plan is facing the same resistance that blocked BIP 300 for nearly a decade, then you should definitely check out our deep dive on the postquantum Bitcoin debate right over here. Thank you all so much for watching and I'll see you again very soon. This is DC signing off.