Proposal to hard-fork Bitcoin to recover $5 billion in Mt. Gox funds fails

Mark Karpelès, using his GitHub handle MagicalTux, submitted a pull request to Bitcoin Core proposing a hard fork that would redirect 79,956 BTC — roughly $5 billion — that have sat untouched since 2011 to an address controlled by the MtGox trustee. The change was under 60 lines of code: a single consensus rule swapping one public key hash for another when validating transactions from the theft address, allowing the trustee to move the coins into Japan’s court‑supervised rehabilitation process.

The activation height was set to infinity, so nothing would happen unless the community explicitly agreed to enable it. The request was open for about 17 hours before the forum was auto‑closed without substantial discussion. Critics said Karpelès should have begun the conversation on community channels such as the Bitcoin development mailing list, bitcointalk or X, or proposed the idea as a formal Bitcoin Improvement Proposal.

Japan

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