Crypto: Mt. Gox's Former CEO Floats Hard Fork To Recover 80k Hacked Bitcoin

Mark Karpelès said it has been 12 years since the start of Mt. Gox’s bankruptcy proceedings and “this is probably the last sore point on this whole case.”

Mark Karpelès, the former CEO of Mt. Gox, is calling on community support for a proposal to recover more than $5.2 billion stolen from his Bitcoin exchange more than a decade ago.

On Friday, Karpelès submitted a proposal on GitHub to add a consensus rule that would allow the 79,956 Bitcoin hacked from Mt. Gox (currently sitting in a single wallet) to be moved to a recovery address without the original private key.

“These coins have not moved in over 15 years. They are among the most well-known and publicly tracked UTXOs in Bitcoin's history,” he wrote.

Karpelès said that with Mt. Gox trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi already overseeing distributions to creditors, if the coins were recoverable, the existing legal and logistical framework would distribute them to their rightful owners.

“I want to be upfront: this is a hard fork. It makes a previously invalid transaction valid. All nodes would need to upgrade before the activation height. I'm not trying to disguise that fact or sneak it through as something else,” he added.

However, Karpelès said the proposal wasn’t intended to bypass the Bitcoin development process; instead, it was an attempt to start a discussion with the Bitcoin community.

“The MtGox trustee has declined to pursue on-chain recovery, citing the uncertainty of whether such a consensus change would ever be adopted,” he said.

“This creates a deadlock: the trustee won't act without certainty, and the community can't evaluate the idea without a concrete proposal. This patch breaks that deadlock by providing something concrete to discuss.”

Karpelès’ proposal saw strong opposition on the online forum Bitcointalk, with most arguing that it would set a bad precedent for Bitcoin, a decentralized cryptocurrency intended to be irreversible and immutable.

Source: CoinTelegraph