Mark Karpel s Proposes Bitcoin Hard Fork for Mt. Gox Hack Recovery

Mark Karpel s, the former CEO of Mt. Gox, has proposed a Bitcoin hard fork to recover approximately 79,956 BTC lost in the 2011 hack. His proposal, titled
Consensus: Allow recovery of Mt Gox stolen funds 79,956 BTC ,
suggests a change in consensus rules to allow these dormant coins to be accessed through a designated recovery address.
The proposal outlines a narrowly scoped change that would enable the unspent outputs locked to a specific address to be spent using a signature from the recovery address. These funds have remained untouched for over 15 years and are believed to be controlled by the original attacker, not by Mt. Gox or its creditors.
Karpel s argues that since there is already a Japanese court-supervised rehabilitation process in place for distributing recovered assets to verified creditors, if the coins could be accessed, they could be allocated legally. The technical change would introduce a new script verification flag, but it is crucial to note that this would constitute a hard fork requiring all nodes to upgrade before activation.
However, the proposal faced immediate backlash. It was auto-closed as spam on Bitcoin Core s Github within hours, preventing further discussion. Pieter Wuille, a Bitcoin Core contributor, directed Karpel s to the appropriate venue for such discussions, emphasizing the need for serious debate on changes to Bitcoin s consensus rules.