Karpelès Proposes Hard Fork to Recover More Than $5.2B of Mt. Gox Bitcoin

Mark Karpelès has submitted a GitHub proposal to add a consensus rule that would allow the 79,956 Bitcoin sitting in a single, long-dormant wallet to be moved to a recovery address without the original private key. “These coins have not moved in over 15 years. They are among the most well-known and publicly tracked UTXOs in Bitcoin's history,” he wrote, and is calling on the community for support.

Karpelès said that with Mt. Gox trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi already overseeing distributions to creditors, the existing legal and logistical framework could distribute any recovered coins to their rightful owners. He was explicit about the mechanism: “I want to be upfront: this is a hard fork.

It makes a previously invalid transaction valid. All nodes would need to upgrade before the activation height.

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