Bitcoin’s hard fork proposal to get back $5 billion in stolen Mt. Gox funds sees no takers

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).

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.

Code is the law

Karpelès had anticipated the objections and listed them himself in the proposal.

The theft is unambiguous, and the coins haven’t moved in 15 years. A legal framework to distribute them already exists. The scope targets one address. Every argument for exceptionalism was there.

Once Bitcoin redirects coins for any reason, the question stops being whether it can and starts being when it will do it again.

Bitfinex victims, DeFi hack victims, and anyone who lost coins to a documented theft could cite this as precedent and seek the same remedy for their incidents. The line between one justified exception and a general mechanism is exactly the kind of subjective boundary Bitcoin was built to avoid.

This is not to say a change in code didn’t happen before.

Previous emergency interventions, such as the 2010 value overflow bug or the 2013 chain split, involved technical failures that threatened the network itself. This was different. The network was working exactly as designed. The proposal was asking it to work differently for one group of people, however sympathetic their case.

The pull request is now closed. $5 billion in bitcoin remains frozen at the same address it’s been at since 2011. And the creditors who might have benefited chose the principal over the payout.

Ultimately, Bitcoin’s fundamental principle of “code is the law” prevailed.