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

Former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpelès, using his GitHub handle MagicalTux, submitted a pull request to Bitcoin Core proposing a hard fork to redirect 79,956 BTC, valued at roughly $5 billion, from an address untouched since 2011 to the MtGox trustee. The proposal involved a minimal code change to facilitate recovery under Japan's court-supervised rehabilitation process, with activation set to infinity pending community agreement. However, the request was immediately shut down, lasting only about 17 hours, partly because Karpelès submitted it directly as a pull request instead of first discussing it on appropriate forums like the Bitcoin development mailing list. Furthermore, several MtGox creditors publicly rejected the idea, prioritizing Bitcoin's core principle that private keys equal ownership over recovering their coins through a protocol rewrite. The community consensus was that while the theft was clear, rewriting Bitcoin's code for one group sets a dangerous precedent for future claims, violating the principle that "code is the law."

(Source：CoinDesk)