Mark Karpelès thought he had a fair question.
The former CEO of defunct exchange MtGox, which operates under his GitHub handle MagicalTux, submitted a pull request to Bitcoin Core over the weekend, proposing a hard fork (a fundamental change in the code that splits the blockchain) that would let 79,956 BTC be redirected from the address they’ve been sitting on since 2011.
At current prices, that’s about $5 billion in bitcoin, which hasn’t moved in 15 years.
The proposal was narrow with just under 60 lines of code. A single consensus rule change that would replace one public key hash with another when validating transactions from the theft address, allowing the MtGox administrator to use the coins and channel them into Japan’s existing court-supervised rehabilitation process.
Read more: Mt Gox: The Story 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 automatically closed even before a discussion took place, where bitcoiners suggested that Karpelès send a pull request directly when he should have discussed the changes on the Bitcoin development list first. Some of them said that Karpelès should first propose this as an official Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP).
To be fair, bitcoin core github is not the appropriate forum for that kind of community discussion. bitcointalk, X, bitcoin mailing list(s), diving, etc. are all more appropriate forums.
— Matt Corallo 🟠 (@TheBlueMatt) 27 February 2026
The people it was supposed to help also rejected it. Several MtGox creditors said publicly on X that they did not want Bitcoin’s rules rewritten on their behalf. The network’s guarantee of private key equal ownership means more to them than getting their coins back.
I am a creditor. Absolutely not. Would break a key pillar in Bitcoin.
— spoon (@spoonmvn) 27 February 2026
Codex is the law
Karpelès had foreseen the objections and stated them himself in the proposal.
The theft is unequivocal and the coins have not moved for 15 years. A legal framework for distributing them already exists. The scope is directed to one address. Every argument for exceptionalism was there.
Once Bitcoin redirects coins for whatever reason, the question stops being if 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 a justified exception and a general mechanism is exactly the kind of subjective line Bitcoin was built to avoid.
This does not mean that a change in code did not happen before.
Previous emergency interventions, such as the 2010 value overflow failure or the 2013 chain split, involved technical failures that threatened the network itself. This was different. The network worked exactly as designed. The proposal asked that it work differently for a group of people, no matter how sympathetic their cause.
The pull request is now closed. $5 billion in bitcoin remains frozen at the same address it has been at since 2011. And the creditors who could have benefited chose the principal over the payout.
In the end, Bitcoin’s fundamental principle of “code is the law” prevailed.
