An interesting debate broke out in the Bitcoin community. The former CEO of MtGox posted a hard fork proposal on GitHub to move about 80,000 BTC that had been frozen for 15 years—but it was quickly rejected.

As background, the BTC that has remained in that address since 2011 is worth roughly $5 billion at current prices. The proposal was fairly straightforward: a single rule change to replace the public key hash during transaction verification from the stolen address. This was supposed to allow the trustee of a failed exchange to spend the coins.

But the community’s reaction was ruthless. Multiple MtGox creditors publicly stated that they do not want the rules of Bitcoin itself rewritten. For them, the network’s basic principle—that private keys determine ownership—mattered more than recovering the coins.

Code changes have not been unheard of so far. They addressed technical obstacles that threatened the network itself, such as the 2010 value overflow issue and the 2013 chain split. But this time was different. Bitcoin was working exactly as designed. In other words, it was a claim of “We want Bitcoin to behave differently for a specific group.”

The pull request was closed immediately. What the entire Bitcoin community, including xbitcoin, showed was that, no matter how sympathetic the circumstances were, they would not budge on fundamental principles. In the end, the philosophy that “code is law”—a belief Bitcoin has upheld from the beginning—prevailed.