$5.2 Billion in Stolen Bitcoin Has Sat Untouched for 15 Years. One Man Wants to Take It Back

Former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpelès has submitted a draft proposal on GitHub to recover approximately 79,956 BTC, valued at over $5.2 billion, stolen in a 2011 hack and sitting untouched in a single dormant address for fifteen years, reigniting one of Bitcoin’s most fundamental ideological debates in the process.

The Proposal

The target is a specific address, beginning with 1Feex, that has been publicly known within the Bitcoin community for years as the destination of the 2011 theft. The funds have not moved. The original private keys are not recoverable. Karpelès’ proposal acknowledges both of those facts and offers a technical path around them.

The mechanism involves adding a new consensus rule to the Bitcoin protocol that would allow the unspent outputs at the 1Feex address to be transferred to a court-supervised recovery address without requiring the original keys. The recovered funds would then be folded into the existing civil rehabilitation process in Japan to provide additional compensation to Mt. Gox creditors.

It is worth being precise about what this proposal is and is not. The 79,956 BTC at 1Feex are entirely separate from the approximately 200,000 BTC already being distributed by trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi under a repayment process with a current deadline of October 31, 2026. Karpelès is not attempting to modify or accelerate that distribution. He is proposing a separate, additional recovery mechanism targeting funds that the existing process cannot touch.

The Disagreement It Has Reopened

The reaction within the Bitcoin developer and node operator community has been largely negative, and the reasoning behind that reaction goes to the core of what Bitcoin is designed to be.

The opposition argument rests on immutability. Bitcoin’s value proposition, in the view of many of its most committed participants, depends on the principle that the ledger cannot be altered by any authority, regardless of the circumstances. A transaction confirmed on the Bitcoin blockchain is final. Creating a consensus rule that moves funds from an address whose owner cannot sign for them violates that principle, even if the original acquisition of those funds was unambiguously criminal.

The counterargument is that the circumstances here are not ambiguous. The theft is documented. The address is identified. The victims are known and have been waiting fifteen years. Proponents argue that a one-time intervention to provide financial justice in a case with a clear historical record is categorically different from establishing a general precedent for reversing transactions.

Both positions are internally consistent. That is precisely what makes the debate difficult to resolve.

The Hard Fork Risk

The technical implementation of the proposal requires a hard fork, which means every node in the Bitcoin network would need to upgrade to the new consensus rules for the change to take effect cleanly. If a significant portion of the network declines to upgrade, the result is a chain split: two separate versions of Bitcoin operating simultaneously, each with its own price, its own community, and its own claim to legitimacy.

That outcome is not theoretical. It has happened before in Bitcoin’s history. The prospect of it happening again over a proposal this controversial is real, which is part of why the Mt. Gox trustee has historically declined to pursue on-chain recovery approaches. The uncertainty of community consensus makes the legal and financial risk of triggering a split difficult to justify.

Where Things Stand

As of late February 2026, the proposal remains a discussion draft with no formal adoption process underway. Karpelès has stated publicly that his intention is not to force the change through but to provide a concrete technical path that breaks what he describes as a deadlock between the trustee and the community. Early responses from the Bitcoin Core developer community suggest that concrete path faces significant resistance.

The 79,956 BTC at 1Feex has sat untouched for fifteen years. Whether it moves again, and under what circumstances, remains an open question with no clear resolution in sight.

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