Mark Karpelès, former CEO of the defunct Mt. Gox exchange, submitted a pull request to execute a hard fork of Bitcoin and recover approximately 79.956 BTC lost. The recovery proposal, now definitively closed, sought to help in the judicial process involving victims affected by a hack that, 15 years ago, marked a before and after in the history of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
The driving force behind this recovery initiative, according to the publication in the GitHub repository, is legal, compensatory to the victims and occurs on the basis of presumably unanimous consensus: what happened to MtGox in 2011 was a theft.
«The recovery [mediante el hard fork] “It would return dormant coins to productive economic use,” commented Karpelès in a Bitcointalk post on the same topic. There is already “a rehabilitation process supervised by a Japanese court that is already actively paying creditors. The legal infrastructure to manage these currencies is established and has been in place for years. “This is not a situation in which we would recover coins without a clear destination,” he assured.
The hard fork proposal that he proposes would only apply to a specific P2PKH address (Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash). Through a modification to the software, the fork would allow funds from said address (1FeexV6…) to be moved to an authorized recovery account without altering other consensus rules the Bitcoin. These lost assets, valued at more than $5 billion, have lain dormant at one address since the platform was hacked in 2011.
Despite the weight of the arguments, the execution of this hard fork is highly unlikelyas evidenced by the heuristic-based automatic closure of the pull request and the community response.
The Bitcoin community maintains immutability as a non-negotiable pillar and any change of this type would require a very broad consensus of nodes and miners. For most users, including Karpelès himself, who acknowledged the following, allowing a “software confiscation”—even for victims of theft— It would set a dangerous precedent against resistance to online censorship.
The MtGox conflict arose in June 2011, when an attacker chronically compromised the exchange’s wallets and moved funds to the 1Feex address. Years later, in 2014, the exchange collapsed after operating in insolvency for a long time.
Since then, the judicial process in Japan has been slow; After going from a simple bankruptcy to a civil rehabilitation process, trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi has managed the return of some 141,000 recovered BTC.
However, the 80,000 BTC from the address mentioned by Karpelès They have never been under judicial controlremaining one of the richest and most static accounts in Bitcoin history.