Think of it from Faketoshi's perspective and it all makes perfect sense. How would you go about getting access to bitcoins without private keys? Your only real option is to start a legal battle, get some judge's order to "assign" them to you, and in parallel try to centralize the miners so that you could try to enforce that order with minimal costs, the less miners/validating nodes there are the easier it would be to force them to comply thus you're more likely to succeed. Label everyone that doesn't agree a criminal
Absolutely. That has been the long part of the con from the tip AFAIK. And I assume CA is in on it. At the very least the sycophants will cheer and lick his toes as they had over the UTXOs for the Satoshi hoard as represented in BSV. But that is not the brass ring he's going for. But it is the iron one he might end up with...