Mt. Gox CEO's Plan To Recover $5B In Stolen Funds Shot Down By Bitcoin Community

Mark Karpelès, former CEO of Mt. Gox, submitted a proposal to Bitcoin Core over the weekend that would have redirected $5 billion in frozen BTC to a recovery address for creditors.

The proposal, which consisted of under 60 lines of code, was rejected within 17 hours by Bitcoin Core contributors.

Karpelès listed several reasons why he believed the coins should be recovered, including that they had not moved in 15 years and a Japan court-supervised legal framework for distribution already exists.

However, the core argument against the proposal was that it would set a precedent for modifying Bitcoin's consensus rules to benefit specific groups, potentially leading to confiscation of funds from other victims such as Bitfinex hack victims or DeFi protocol exploit creditors.