Mark Karpelès thought he had an inexpensive ask.
The previous CEO of defunct alternate MtGox, working underneath his GitHub deal with MagicalTux, submitted a pull request to Bitcoin Core over the weekend proposing a tough fork (a elementary change in code that splits the blockchain) that might let 79,956 BTC be redirected from the tackle they have been sitting in since 2011.
At present costs, that is roughly $5 billion in bitcoin that hasn’t moved in 15 years.
The proposal was slender, with just below 60 strains of code. A single consensus rule change that might substitute one public key hash for one more when validating transactions from the theft tackle, permitting the MtGox trustee to spend the cash and route them into Japan’s present court-supervised rehabilitation course of.
Learn extra: Mt Gox: The Historical past of a Failed Bitcoin Change
The activation top was set to infinity, that means nothing would occur until the group explicitly agreed to show it on.
It lasted about 17 hours.
The discussion board was auto-closed even earlier than a dialogue occurred, with bitcoiners suggesting that Karpelès submitted a pull request straight when he ought to’ve first mentioned the modifications on the Bitcoin growth listing. A few of them stated that Karpelès ought to first suggest this as an official Bitcoin Enchancment Proposal (BIP).
To be truthful, bitcoin core github is not the suitable discussion board for that sort of group dialogue. bitcointalk, X, bitcoin mailing listing(s), delving, and many others are all a extra applicable discussion board.
— Matt Corallo (@TheBlueMatt) February 27, 2026
The individuals it was supposed to assist rejected it, too. A number of MtGox collectors stated publicly on X that they did not need Bitcoin’s guidelines rewritten on their behalf. The community’s assure that non-public keys equal possession issues extra to them than getting their cash again.
I’m a creditor. Completely not. Would break a key pillar of Bitcoin.
— spoon (@spoonmvn) February 27, 2026
Code is the legislation
Karpelès had anticipated the objections and listed them himself within the proposal.
The theft is unambiguous, and the cash have not moved in 15 years. A authorized framework to distribute them already exists. The scope targets one tackle. Each argument for exceptionalism was there.
As soon as Bitcoin redirects cash for any motive, the query stops being whether or not it might and begins being when it should do it once more.
Bitfinex victims, DeFi hack victims, and anybody who misplaced cash to a documented theft may cite this as precedent and search the identical treatment for his or her incidents. The road between one justified exception and a common mechanism is strictly the sort of subjective boundary Bitcoin was constructed to keep away from.
This isn’t to say a change in code did not occur earlier than.
Earlier emergency interventions, such because the 2010 worth overflow bug or the 2013 chain break up, concerned technical failures that threatened the community itself. This was totally different. The community was working precisely as designed. The proposal was asking it to work otherwise for one group of individuals, nonetheless sympathetic their case.
The pull request is now closed. $5 billion in bitcoin stays frozen on the identical tackle it has been at since 2011. And the collectors who may need benefited selected the principal over the payout.
Finally, Bitcoin’s elementary precept of “code is the legislation” prevailed.
