The post How Mt. Gox’s Former Boss Plans To Retrieve 80,000 Bitcoin Stolen In 2011 Via Hard Fork ⋆ ZyCrypto appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

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&nbsp Mark Karpelès, ex-CEO of the collapsed Japanese crypto giant Mt. Gox, is proposing a Bitcoin hard fork that could unlock nearly 80,000 BTC — worth more than $5.2 billion— from a long-dormant address linked to the notorious 2011 hack. Mt. Gox’s Stolen Bitcoin Lies Dormant for 15 Years On Feb. 27, Mark Karpelès submitted a GitHub proposal to introduce a new Bitcoin consensus rule that would enable the 79,956 BTC stolen from Mt. Gox—currently held in a single dormant wallet—to be transferred to a recovery address without needing the original private key. The proposal focuses on the address 1Feex…sb6uF, which received the Bitcoin loot after Mt. Gox’s systems were compromised in June 2011. The coins have remained untouched for over 15 years, hinting that the hacker may have lost the private keys—or simply chosen not to move or return the funds. “These coins have not moved in over 15 years. They are among the most well-known and publicly tracked UTXOs in Bitcoin’s history,” Karpelès wrote.  Under Bitcoin’s current rules, the stolen funds can only be moved with the original private key. Karpelès’ proposal seeks to “add a consensus rule that allows spending the unspent outputs locked to the theft address using a signature from the Mt. Gox recovery address, so that the funds can be returned to Mt.Gox creditors through the existing court-supervised rehabilitation process.” Advertisement

&nbsp Karpelès presents the draft as a conversation starter, describing it as “an attempt to start a discussion about whether the Bitcoin community considers this specific, exceptional case worth addressing.” The former Mt. Gox boss emphasizes that the proposed fork would apply only to this single address and would take effect at a future block height if approved by the network. “I want to be upfront: this is a…

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Filed under: News - @ February 28, 2026 1:24 pm