You Own Your EarthBucks

You own your EarthBucks. Title is legal, under the law of the United States of America. Astrohacker Inc. has no right to steal user funds. Expiry will never, under any circumstances, be used to take EBX from the rightful owner.

Expiry and recovery exist to keep the rightful owner in possession. Expiry and recovery make it more likely, not less, that a user keeps their EBX compared with Bitcoin. Bitcoin makes it easier to lose access through key loss or theft. EarthBucks makes it easier to put the rightful owner back in possession.

A user asked whether they still need to consolidate and move their coins as soon as possible. You do not need to consolidate and move your coins. There is still an expiry on UTXOs. UTXO expiry is intended to upgrade the transaction structure, not to take coins away. If consolidation is needed to reduce the burden on the EBX network, the pool or wallet may do it on your behalf. This post is the durable public version of that answer.

Legal Ownership, Not Cryptographic Ownership

Ownership is a legal fact, not a cryptographic fact. Your EBX is not secured by cryptography. Your EBX is secured by the law. Cryptography is a partially effective way to enforce the law. Sometimes other procedures are required so the rightful owner can actually spend.

A key is a lock. A lock is not a deed. If the keyholder is not the legal owner, the coins are still the owner’s. If the owner lost the key, the coins are still the owner’s.

What Expiry and Recovery Are For

There is still UTXO expiry. Current standard scripts recover after 60 days and expire after 90 days. The 60-day and 90-day window is the mechanism, not a deadline to dump or consolidate coins.

Use expiry and recovery only in these cases.

Upgrade the transaction structure. Cryptography can break. Data structures may need to change for efficiency or scalability. Expired UTXOs may be rotated automatically into the new structure. Automatic rotation is maintenance of the owner’s coins, not a seizure.

Lost keys. People lose keys. After the expiry window, pools and wallets may recover funds when the person proves their identity, and deliver the EBX back to the owner. The old keys are not recovered. The EarthBucks are returned to the owner.

Death and other legal title changes. People die. People may lose legal ownership for other lawful reasons, including estate and court process. The same expiry and recovery path is how EBX is delivered to the person the law names as owner.

Consolidate UTXOs. Pools and wallets may use expiry and recovery to consolidate EBX on the user’s behalf. Consolidation may be necessary to reduce the burden on the EBX network. The coins stay the owner’s. The user does not have to merge them by hand.

Pools and wallets do this work. This is not a company back door.

What This Is Not

Astrohacker Inc. never has the right to take user funds. Expiry is never a taking from the rightful owner.

Expiry is not a HODL penalty. Paper wallets do not get mined to active users. Abandoned coins do not go to the mine after a long time. You are not required to consolidate and move coins as soon as possible.

Earlier posts described the mechanism. This post is the ownership rule those mechanisms must obey.

Why All UTXOs Expire After 90 Days explained upgradeability and the 90-day window.

Recovering Tokens from Lost Private Keys and Expired Outputs described the 60/90 recovery script and identity for lost keys.

EarthBucks Don’t Expire (But UTXOs Do) said EBX itself does not expire, and that UTXOs cycle so software can change. This post supersedes the December 8 allowance for mines to spend long-abandoned UTXOs to themselves.

Why This Is Better for Users Than Bitcoin

On Bitcoin, lost keys usually mean lost coins. On Bitcoin, stolen keys usually mean stolen coins. There is no lawful recovery path on-chain. The lack of a recovery path is often sold as a feature. The lack of a recovery path is a way to lose your money.

On EarthBucks, lost keys are a lock problem. Identity and, when needed, legal process can restore possession to the owner. Theft of a key does not automatically become theft of title. Death does not vaporize the estate’s EBX.

Expiry exists so the software can change, so recovery can run, and so a pool or wallet can consolidate UTXOs when that reduces the burden on the network. Expiry makes long-term ownership safer, not weaker.

EarthBucks is not immune to theft of a logged-in session or a compromised account. Title stays with the rightful owner. The design prefers restoring possession over treating a key as the last word.