Odaily Planet Daily reports that Mark Karpelès, former CEO of the defunct exchange Mt. Gox, has recently proposed a Bitcoin hard fork scheme aimed at recovering approximately 79,956 BTC stolen in the 2011 hack, valued at around $5.2 billion at current prices.
This proposal concerns a wallet address associated with the 2011 breach of the Mt. Gox system, which received nearly 80,000 bitcoins following the hack and has remained untouched for over 15 years. Under Bitcoin’s existing rules, these funds can only be moved if the corresponding private key is possessed.
Under the proposal, the new rules would allow unspent outputs in the Mt. Gox recovery address to be controlled by signatures from that address, thereby incorporating the funds into the existing court-supervised distribution process to repay Mt. Gox creditors.
Karpelès stated that the proposal serves only as a starting point for discussion, with rule modifications limited to a single address and activation at a specific future block height. However, the proposal also acknowledges that this approach requires a coordinated network upgrade, and if some community members refuse to support it, it could pose a risk of blockchain fragmentation.
It should be noted that these approximately 80,000 BTC are not currently part of the assets available for distribution to Mt. Gox creditors, nor are they under the control of the bankruptcy trustee.