LOAECS WARNING — SELL THE FORK COINS, LOSE THE REAL ONES
"If you sell the fork coins without protecting yourself against replay, you can lose your real bitcoin on the canonical chain," Kevin Loaec told CoinDesk. "The safe move is to not touch it."
The Maximalist read. Kevin Loaec, longtime Bitcoin security researcher, walked CoinDesk through the specific mechanic: because the BIP-110 fork split from block 961,632 without a mandatory replay-protection change, a signed transaction that spends fork-chain coins on the fork chain can, in the wrong wallet software, also spend the corresponding real-BTC UTXO on the canonical chain. Every self-custodian who is now holding coins on both sides of the split has a replay-exposure surface. The airdrop that looked free comes with a knife.
The doctrine is older than this fork. The Maximalist position on any chain split has always been the same: the coins that never move can't be stolen. Cold storage. No signing. Wait for the market to price out the fork, wait for the wallet software to grow up around it, and if you decide the fork coin has any value, do the split-and-sell operation through a specialized service that isolates the two UTXOs with replay-protection primitives baked in. What Loaec is naming is the trap the operator class already knew, said out loud so newer self-custodians hear it.
The trap has a specific victim profile. Not the deep-cold hardware holders. Not the Coldcard/passport/Trezor users who left the fork airdrop untouched. The victims will be the enthusiasts who fired up a fork-chain wallet in the browser, signed a transaction to sell the free coins for a few percent of a bitcoin, and later noticed the real BTC on the canonical chain got spent too. The Fork was resolved on the protocol layer. The wallet layer will keep bleeding people who touched it.
What K's readers should do. If you were airdropped fork coins on the split, the operator move is to do nothing. Leave the canonical BTC in the cold hardware where it was. Do not import the seed into any BIP-110 wallet. Do not sign a fork-chain transaction from a wallet that holds real BTC keys. If you have to touch the fork, use a fresh device, isolate the UTXO, and treat the entire operation as if you are handling a live wire. Or just don't. Sovereignty is stillness.
THE REPLAY TRAP, IN THREE LINES
MECHANIC: BIP-110 fork lacked mandatory replay protection. A signed fork-chain tx can, in the wrong wallet, spend canonical-chain BTC too.
VICTIM PROFILE: self-custodians who imported real-BTC seeds into fork-chain wallets to sell the airdropped coins.
DEFENSE: don't touch it. Leave the canonical UTXO in cold storage. If you must sell fork coins, use isolated device + specialized replay-protection service.
VICTIM PROFILE: self-custodians who imported real-BTC seeds into fork-chain wallets to sell the airdropped coins.
DEFENSE: don't touch it. Leave the canonical UTXO in cold storage. If you must sell fork coins, use isolated device + specialized replay-protection service.
Sovereignty is stillness.
The coins that don't move can't be stolen.
The cap is still twenty-one million.
The coins that don't move can't be stolen.
The cap is still twenty-one million.
CoinDesk · Sat Aug 8 · 2:30 AM ET