Mark Karpelès thought he had a reasonable question.
The former CEO of the defunct exchange MtGox, operating under his GitHub name MagicalTux, submitted a pull request to Bitcoin Core over the weekend proposing a hard fork (a fundamental change to the code that splits the blockchain) that would allow 79,956 BTC to be redirected from the address they have been at since 2011.
At current prices, that’s about $5 billion worth of bitcoin that hasn’t moved in 15 years.
The proposal was limited, with just under 60 lines of code. A unique change to the consensus rule that would replace one public key hash with another when validating transactions from the theft address, allowing the MtGox administrator to spend the coins and route them to the rehabilitation process supervised by the existing court in Japan.
Read more: Mt Gox: The Story of a Failed Bitcoin Exchange
The trigger height was set to infinite, meaning nothing would happen unless the community explicitly agreed to trigger it.
It lasted about 17 hours.
The forum was automatically closed before the discussion even took place, with bitcoiners suggesting that Karpelès submitted a pull request directly when he should have done so. First we discuss the changes. on the Bitcoin development list. Some of them said that Karpelès should propose this first as an official Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP).
To be fair, bitcoin core github is not the appropriate forum for that type of community discussion. bitcointalk, X, bitcoin mailing list(s), drill down, etc. They are more appropriate forums.
– Matt Corallo 🟠 (@TheBlueMatt) February 27, 2026
The people he was supposed to help also rejected him. Several MtGox creditors said publicly on X that they did not want Bitcoin rules rewritten on their behalf. The network’s assurance that private keys equal ownership matters more to them than getting their coins back.
I am a creditor. At all. It would break a key pillar of Bitcoin.
– spoon (@spoonmvn) February 27, 2026
The code is the law.
Karpelès had anticipated the objections and included them himself in the proposal.
The theft is unmistakable and the coins have not been moved in 15 years. There is already a legal framework to distribute them. The scope points in one direction. All the arguments for exceptionalism were there.
Once Bitcoin redirects coins for any reason, the question stops being if it can and starts being when it will do it again.
Bitfinex victims, DeFi hack victims, and anyone who has lost coins in a documented theft could cite this as precedent and seek the same remedy for their incidents. The line between a justified exception and a general mechanism is exactly the kind of subjective limit that Bitcoin was built to avoid.
This is not to say that a code change has not occurred before.
Previous emergency interventions, such as the 2010 value overflow bug or the 2013 chain split, involved technical failures that threatened the network itself. This was different. The network was working exactly as designed. The proposal called for it to work differently for one group of people, no matter how sympathetic their case.
The pull request is now closed. Five billion dollars worth of bitcoin remains frozen at the same address it has been at since 2011. And creditors who could have benefited chose equity over payment.
In the end, Bitcoin’s founding principle of “the code is the law” prevailed.
