Bitcoin’s hard fork proposal to get back $5 billion in stolen Mt. Gox funds sees no takers
The post Bitcoin’s hard fork proposal to get back $5 billion in stolen Mt. Gox funds sees no takers appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
Mark Karpelès thought he had a reasonable ask. The former CEO of defunct exchange MtGox, operating under his GitHub handle MagicalTux, submitted a pull request to Bitcoin Core over the weekend proposing a hard fork (a fundamental change in code that splits the blockchain) that would let 79,956 BTC be redirected from the address they’ve been sitting in since 2011. At current prices, that’s roughly $5 billion in bitcoin that hasn’t moved in 15 years. The proposal was narrow, with just under 60 lines of code. A single consensus rule change that would substitute one public key hash for another when validating transactions from the theft address, allowing the MtGox trustee to spend the coins and route them into Japan’s existing court-supervised rehabilitation process. Read more: Mt Gox: The History of a Failed Bitcoin Exchange The activation height was set to infinity, meaning nothing would happen unless the community explicitly agreed to turn it on. It lasted about 17 hours. The forum was auto-closed even before a discussion took place, with bitcoiners suggesting that Karpelès submitted a pull request directly when he should’ve first discussed the changes on the Bitcoin development list. Some of them said that Karpelès should first propose this as an official Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP). To be fair, bitcoin core github isn’t the appropriate forum for that kind of community discussion. bitcointalk, X, bitcoin mailing list(s), delving, etc are all a more appropriate forum. — Matt Corallo 🟠 (@TheBlueMatt) February 27, 2026 The people it was supposed to help rejected it, too. Several MtGox creditors said publicly on X that they didn’t want Bitcoin’s rules rewritten on their behalf. The network’s guarantee that private keys equal ownership matters more to them than getting their coins back. I’m a creditor. Absolutely not. Would break a key pillar…
Filed under: News - @ February 28, 2026 3:29 pm