I forget the exact words used, but an analogy along the lines of "Going to an abandoned house and placing money in a dresser drawer" was made when I was going over the miner addresses that had been inactive both on Eligius and the blockchain for multiple years.
Aside from the specific matter, it sounds like the lawyer does not grasp how Bitcoin works. Addresses are only ever used by one sender (and normally should only be used for a single transaction), so their activity level is directly related to whether Eligius is sending bitcoins to them. They should never be used for anything else. So
if that was the only factor, I would say they should be assumed to still be active - there is no comparison to an abandoned house, since there is no basis to think they have been abandoned at all.
Just for future reference, or in case anyone else encounters a similar situation...
Yes, I actually did go over those details with them, but it was agreed that such a distinction would probably be pretty difficult to grasp properly in a legal setting anyway. Plus, when going over the possible related payouts, it didn't make much difference anyway resulting in the final distribution checklist that actually didn't take such potential inactivity into account and followed the original payout rules with a minimum payout of 2 TBC for miners that had no unpaid balance prior to distribution of these funds towards shelved shares.
Apologies for the ambiguity, as the inactivity type discussion actually wasn't actually taken into account much related to the block withholding attack funds, but more about the MtGox address held funds, which were still in fact distributed to those addresses regardless of inactivity.
The distribution of these funds went as follows, as approved by legal counsel:
Miners from the time period that were no longer active at Eligius nor had a balance but had a potential reward deficit of more than 2 TBC (0.00131072 BTC) had those shelved CPPSRB shares awarded.
Miners from the time period that were either still active at Eligius and/or had an outstanding balance such that awarding their shelved shares from the time period would bring their balance to 2 TBC (0.00131072 BTC) had those shelved CPPSRB shares awarded.
The above only helped less than 0.5% of miners in the final Eligius-Ra payout and left over 98% of the block withholding attack related funds unrewarded.
The remaining funds were awarded to shares starting at the top of the CPPSRB share log. This had the effect of rewarding a large number of shelved shares of miners who have been active at Eligius over the past half-year or more.
