Key Insights:
- As per the latest crypto news, former Mt. Gox CEO Karpelès wants support for a hard fork to recover 79,956 stolen Mt. Gox BTC ($5.2B).
- The patch would let the coins move to a recovery address without the private key; the trustee would distribute.
- He admits it’s a hard fork and says it’s meant to spark review, since the trustee won’t act without certainty.
- Critics warn it breaks immutability; some creditors back court action to reclaim the coins.
According to recent crypto news, former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpelès proposed a hard fork to recover 80,000 stolen BTC. The CEO said 12 years have passed since Mt. Gox entered bankruptcy, yet one painful issue still hangs over the case.
He argued that the story cannot fully close while a large pile of stolen bitcoin remains locked in plain sight.
Crypto News: Former Mt. Gox CEO Says Hard Fork Could Help Recover 80,000 Stolen Bitcoin
This week’s crypto news shows that the former Mt. Gox CEO asked the Bitcoin community to consider an unusual recovery plan. He published a proposal on GitHub that would change Bitcoin’s consensus rules. Thus, the network could move 79,956 BTC linked to the Mt. Gox hack into a designated recovery address.
Worth over $5.2 billion, the coins sit in one wallet and are effectively frozen without the private key. Karpelès said they haven’t moved in 15+ years and remain some of Bitcoin’s most closely watched UTXOs. In his view, public visibility makes this case distinct from everyday thefts that vanish into mixers and fragmented wallets.
Still, his plan comes with a major trade-off. He acknowledged the change would require a hard fork. In practical terms, it would make a transaction valid that Bitcoin’s current rules reject. That means node operators, miners, exchanges, and wallet providers would need to upgrade before a set activation block height for the rule to take effect.
Karpelès presented the proposal as a starting point, not a shortcut. He said the Mt. Gox trustee, Nobuaki Kobayashi, already runs the distribution process for creditors. So, if the network could recover the coins, the existing legal and administrative structure could, in theory, route them to the rightful owners.
Karpelès said the trustee hasn’t pursued on-chain recovery because adoption is uncertain and the community could reject it. He argued that this has created a deadlock, with the trustee waiting for certainty and the network waiting for a concrete plan to review.
He said the patch exists to provide the debate with a clear starting point, as per his crypto news commentary.
Crypto News: Critics Call It a Slippery Slope for Bitcoin’s Core Rules
On Bitcointalk, posters warned that the idea threatens Bitcoin’s core promise of immutability. They argued that once the network rewrites the rules to rescue coins in one famous case, future victims will demand the same treatment after every major hack. In their view, repeated exceptions would turn Bitcoin into a system where social pressure and politics can override finality.
The crypto news reveals that others raised a different concern. They said Bitcoin should not hinge on what courts or law enforcement in any jurisdiction decide. Even if a case looks clear, tying protocol changes to legal conclusions risks importing government influence into a decentralized network.
Karpelès did not dismiss those objections. However, he maintained that the Mt. Gox wallet stands apart because a broad consensus already exists about what happened and where the stolen funds sit. In short, he framed this as a rare, highly specific repair, not a general tool for clawbacks.
Not everyone rejected the idea. Some people who claim to have suffered losses on the Mt. Gox collapse voiced support. They argued that any mechanism that returns more funds to creditors deserves consideration.
They pointed out that many creditors already received only a fraction of what they originally held. So, the locked coins represent a chance to correct an old imbalance.
The Collapse of Mt. Gox
The argument lands on top of one of Bitcoin’s most infamous failures. Mt. Gox dominated early crypto trading from 2010 to 2014. At its peak, it handled the majority of global Bitcoin transactions. That scale also made it a prime target.
The first cracks showed up in 2011. According to past crypto news, attackers found backdoors and siphoned off thousands of BTC. But the damage didn’t stop there. Reports later pointed to internal chaos and weak controls that allowed even more coins to vanish.
By late February 2014, Mt. Gox was reportedly short about 744,408 BTC. It filed for bankruptcy in Tokyo on Feb. 28, 2014, citing liabilities of around $65 million and total losses of about 850,000 BTC, valued at nearly $500 million at the time.