I just came across an interesting news story about Mt. Gox. Marc Karpeles, the former CEO of that platform, is back with a rather controversial idea: a Hard Fork of Bitcoin to recover the 80,000 bitcoins that were stolen starting in 2011.

What’s intriguing is that this amount (80000 BTC) has been sleeping peacefully for more than 15 years. No one has touched it at all. It has remained in the same address since that attack. At today’s prices, the value of the stolen funds is over $5 billion—definitely not a small figure.

Karpeles’s idea is quite specific. He proposes adding a new rule to the Bitcoin protocol that would allow the transfer of those 80,000 bitcoins using a signature from Mt. Gox, rather than having to rely on the hacker’s private key. The recovered funds would then flow into a restoration process overseen by the courts to pay the creditors.

But this is what makes it complicated: changing the Bitcoin protocol isn’t easy. Bitcoin’s value is built on a single promise—the rules of the game don’t change. If we allow reversing a theft once because it was large and there is supporting documentation, then other victims of different incidents would have clear grounds to ask for the same thing. Once that door is opened, there’s no clear mechanism to close it again.

There’s also a technical risk. If a large number of nodes and miners reject the upgrade, Bitcoin could split into two competing chains. The history of forks in the past has shown that this isn’t just hypothetical.

What should be emphasized is that these 80,000 bitcoins are separate from the approximately 200,000 bitcoins recovered in 2014, which are currently being repaid to creditors through the ongoing legal process. These are two funds, two processes, and two different timeframes.

The point is—solving the problem with the documented 80,000 bitcoins seems reasonable. But you have to convince the world’s decentralized network that this exception won’t become a precedent. And history of financial systems shows that true exceptions almost never stay that way permanently.