Mt. Gox Founder Calls for Hard Fork to Unlock Dormant 80,000 BTC |

What Is Being Proposed?

Mark Karpelès, the former CEO of defunct exchange Mt. Gox, has published a draft proposal calling for a Bitcoin hard fork that would allow roughly 79,956 BTC — valued at more than $5.2 billion at current prices — to be recovered from a wallet linked to the exchange’s 2011 hack. The proposal targets the address 1Feex...sb6uF, which received nearly 80,000 BTC after Mt. Gox’s systems were compromised in June 2011. The coins have not moved in over 15 years. Under current Bitcoin rules, they can only be spent using the corresponding private key. Karpelès suggests introducing a new consensus rule that would permit spending the unspent outputs tied to that address using a signature from the official Mt. Gox recovery address. According to the draft, this would allow the funds to be returned to creditors through the ongoing court-supervised rehabilitation process in Japan. The document describes the idea as “an attempt to start a discussion about whether the Bitcoin community considers this specific, exceptional case worth addressing.” It proposes that the rule would apply only to that single address and would activate at a future block height if adopted by the network.

Why Is This Controversial?

The proposal openly acknowledges that it would require a coordinated network upgrade and could trigger a chain split if parts of the ecosystem refuse to adopt the change. A hard fork would require broad agreement among miners, node operators, exchanges, and other infrastructure providers. Supporters may argue that the theft is “unambiguous,” that the funds have remained untouched for more than a decade, and that a formal rehabilitation framework already exists to distribute any recovered assets to verified creditors. Critics, however, point to the precedent it could set. The draft itself concedes the concern that altering ownership rules for a specific address challenges Bitcoin’s immutability. “If it can be done once, the argument goes, it can be done again,” the document states. Another unresolved question is governance: who decides which historical hacks justify protocol intervention. Bitcoin has experienced numerous major breaches over the years, and selectively rewriting rules for one case could open the door to similar demands in future incidents.

Investor Takeaway

Even if unlikely to gain consensus, the proposal reopens debate over Bitcoin’s core principle of immutability — a topic that can affect long-term network credibility and governance perception.

How Does This Relate to Ongoing Mt. Gox Repayments?

The roughly 80,000 BTC referenced in the proposal are not part of the assets currently being distributed to Mt. Gox creditors. Following the exchange’s collapse in 2014, around 200,000 BTC were later recovered and placed under the control of court-appointed trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi as part of Japan’s civil rehabilitation process. Repayments to creditors began in mid-2024, funded from those recovered holdings. The repayment deadline has since been extended to October 2026. Public blockchain data indicates the estate still holds tens of thousands of BTC, and past transfers have typically preceded distribution events. The coins tied to the 2011 hack wallet remain outside the trustee’s control. Without a valid private key — or a protocol-level intervention — they remain unspendable under existing rules.

What Happens Next?

The proposal is framed as a discussion draft rather than a formal improvement proposal with broad backing. For any hard fork to move forward, it would require wide support across Bitcoin’s decentralized ecosystem. Historically, Bitcoin community consensus around contentious protocol changes has been difficult to achieve, particularly when they touch on ownership rights and transaction finality. Even the perception that rules could be adjusted retroactively carries reputational weight for a network built on predictability.