Mark Karpelès, the former CEO of collapsed exchange Mt. Gox, submitted a pull request to Bitcoin (BTC) Core over the weekend proposing a hard fork that would redirect 79,956 BTC - frozen at a single address since 2011 and worth approximately $5 billion at current prices - to a Mt. Gox trustee recovery address.
The request was closed within 17 hours, before any formal discussion took place. The creditors the proposal was intended to help rejected it publicly, too.
The patch ran under 60 lines of code. It would have hard-coded a single consensus rule change allowing a designated recovery key to override the current controller of the theft address, with the activation block height set to infinity -meaning nothing would execute unless the community explicitly voted to turn it on.
Karpelès listed the objections himself in the proposal: the theft is unambiguous, the coins have not moved in 15 years, and a Japan court-supervised legal framework for distribution already exists.
Why It Was Rejected
The pull request was auto-closed for procedural reasons first: Bitcoin Core contributors noted Karpelès should have opened a discussion on the Bitcoin development mailing list before submitting code, and formally proposed a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal.
But the substantive objections ran deeper.
Several Mt. Gox creditors said on X they did not want Bitcoin's consensus rules rewritten on their behalf - that the network's guarantee that private key ownership equals final settlement matters more to them than the recovery.
The Precedent Problem
The core argument against the proposal had nothing to do with sympathy for the victims. Bitcoin has been modified under genuine emergency before: the 2010 value overflow bug and the 2013 chain split both involved active technical failures threatening the network's integrity. This situation was categorically different.
The network functioned exactly as designed - the proposal asked it to operate differently for one specific group.
Once a chain reassigns coins for any reason, the category of eligible exceptions expands immediately. Bitfinex hack victims, DeFi protocol exploit creditors, and anyone with a documented and unambiguous theft could cite the Mt. Gox ruling as precedent.
The line between a justified exception and a general confiscation mechanism is precisely the kind of discretionary boundary Bitcoin's consensus model was built to eliminate. The pull request is now closed. The coins remain at the same address where they have sat since 2011.
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