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Mt. Gox Ex-CEO’s Bitcoin Hard-Fork Bid to Recover 80,000 BTC Meets Swift Rebuff

Developers closed the GitHub proposal within hours, rejecting any rule change to reassign the long-dormant 1Feex coins.

Overview

  • Mark Karpelès submitted a Bitcoin Core pull request proposing a hard fork to let the Mt. Gox trustee spend 79,956 BTC stolen in 2011 by redirecting them to a recovery address.
  • The draft applied a single consensus exception to the 1Feex address by substituting its public key hash, set activation to an unreachable height, and arrived as a discussion starter rather than an official BIP.
  • Maintainers shut the PR after about 17 hours as developers pointed discussion to the mailing list, warning that altering ownership rules would erode Bitcoin’s immutability.
  • Several Mt. Gox creditors publicly opposed changing the protocol for their case, though some voiced support for pursuing court-ordered recovery of the dormant coins.
  • Trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi has ruled out on-chain action without broad network backing, the targeted coins remain unmoved, and separate distributions of roughly 200,000 BTC to creditors continue toward an October 2026 deadline.