Former Mt. Gox CEO Tried To Rewrite Bitcoin's Code To Recover $5B In Stolen Funds - The Community Killed It In 17 Hours

Mark Karpelès, the former CEO of collapsed exchange Mt. Gox, submitted a pull request to Bitcoin (BTC) Core over the weekend proposing a hard fork that would redirect 79,956 BTC - frozen at a single address since 2011 and worth approximately $5 billion at current prices - to a Mt. Gox trustee recovery address.

The request was closed within 17 hours, before any formal discussion took place. The creditors the proposal was intended to help rejected it publicly, too.

The patch ran under 60 lines of code. It would have hard-coded a single consensus rule change allowing a designated recovery key to override the current controller of the theft address, with the activation block height set to infinity -meaning nothing would execute unless the community explicitly voted to turn it on.

Karpelès listed the objections himself in the proposal: the theft is unambiguous, the coins have not moved in 15 years, and a Japan court-supervised legal framework for distribution already exists.

Why It Was Rejected

The pull request was auto-closed for procedural reasons first: Bitcoin Core contributors noted Karpelès should have opened a discussion on the Bitcoin development mailing list before submitting code, and formally proposed a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal.