Mark Karpelès thought he had a reasonable request.
The former CEO of the defunct exchange MtGox, operating under his GitHub handle MagicalTux, submitted a pull request to Bitcoin Core this weekend proposing a hard fork (a fundamental change in the code that divides the blockchain) that would redirect 79,956 BTC from the address they have been in since 2011.
At current prices, that’s about $5 billion worth of bitcoin that 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 MtGox’s trustee to spend the coins and route them to the rehabilitation process overseen by Japanese courts.
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 enable it.
This lasted about 17 hours.
The forum was automatically closed before a discussion even took place, with bitcoiners suggesting that Karpelès submitted a pull request directly when he should have been discussing changes to the Bitcoin development list for the first time. Some of them said that Karpelès should first propose this as an official Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP).
To be honest, the main Bitcoin github is not the appropriate forum for this type of community discussion. bitcointalk, X, Bitcoin mailing list(s), dig, etc. are all more appropriate forums.
– Matt Corallo 🟠 (@TheBlueMatt) February 27, 2026
The people he was supposed to help also rejected him. Several MtGox creditors have publicly stated on X that they do not want Bitcoin’s rules rewritten on their behalf. The network’s guarantee of equal ownership of private keys matters more to them than getting their coins back.
I am a creditor. Absolutely not. This would break a key pillar of Bitcoin.
– spoon (@spoonmvn) February 27, 2026
The code is the law
Karpelès had anticipated the objections and had himself listed them in the proposal.
The theft is unambiguous and the parts have not moved for 15 years. A legal framework for distributing them already exists. The scope targets an address. All the arguments in favor of the exception were there.
Once Bitcoin redirects coins for whatever reason, the question no longer becomes if it can and starts to wonder when it will do it again.
Bitfinex victims, DeFi hack victims, and anyone who lost coins following documented theft could cite this as precedent and seek the same remedy for their incidents. The boundary between a justified exception and a general mechanism is exactly the kind of subjective boundary that Bitcoin was built to avoid.
This is not to say that no code changes have taken place before.
Previous emergency interventions, such as the 2010 overflow bug or the 2013 chain split, involved technical failures that threatened the network itself. It was different. The network worked exactly as expected. The proposal called for the system to work differently for a group of people, no matter how nice they might be.
The pull request is now closed. $5 billion in bitcoins have remained frozen at the same address since 2011. And creditors who could have benefited have chosen principal over payment.
In the end, Bitcoin’s fundamental principle of “code is law” prevailed.
