Mark Karpeles, former CEO of the defunct Mt. Gox exchange, has filed a pull request to perform a hard fork of Bitcoin and recover approximately $1,000. 79.956BTC I lost it. The recall proposal, which has now been finalized, is aimed at assisting in the judicial process involving victims affected by the hack that had a major impact before and after the history of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies 15 years ago.
According to publications in the GitHub repository, the driving force behind this recovery initiative is legality and compensation for victims, likely based on unanimous consent. What happened to MtGox in 2011 was theft.
“Recovery[through a hard fork]would bring dormant coins back into productive economic use,” Karpeles commented in a Bitcoin Talk post on the same topic. He asserted that there is already a “recovery process overseen by Japanese courts, and they are already actively paying creditors. The legal infrastructure governing these currencies is well-established and has been in place for years. This is not a situation where you recover coins without a clear destination.”
His proposed hard fork proposal Applies only to specific P2PKH addresses (Payment for public key hash). By modifying the software, the fork will be able to move funds from the above address (1FeexV6…) to an authorized collection account. without changing other consensus rules Bitcoin. These lost assets, worth more than $5 billion, have been sitting at an address since the platform was hacked in 2011.
Despite the weight of the debate, It is very unlikely that this hard fork will take placeThis is evidenced by the automatic closing of pull requests and community responses based on heuristics.
The Bitcoin community holds immutability as a non-negotiable pillar, and these kinds of changes require very broad consensus among nodes and miners. For most users, including Karpeles himself, he admits: “Software forfeiture” is allowed, even if you are the victim of theft. It would set a dangerous precedent for resistance to online censorship.
The MtGox dispute began in June 2011, when attackers chronically compromised the exchange’s wallets and moved funds to 1Feex addresses. A few years later, in 2014, the exchange collapsed after years of bankruptcy.
Since then, Japan’s judicial process has been delayed. After moving from simple bankruptcy to civil rehabilitation process, trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi managed the return of approximately 141,000 BTC recovered.
However, 80,000 BTC from the address mentioned by Karpeles they have never been under judicial controlremains one of the richest and most static accounts in Bitcoin history.