CoinDesk Removes Mt. Gox from Bitcoin Price Index
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Throwing "lol Magic: The Gathering", is pretty ignorant.
No disputing that the domain name itself was an acronym for "Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange", but I'm failing to find any concrete evidence that Mt. Gox's code started out as a card trading platform. Just circumstantial evidence and speculation - that Wired article that the Mt. Gox Wikipedia article cites as its source included.
Depending on how the trading card site was constructed, large chunks of the code base for exchanging cards could be used for exchanging Bitcoins (though not, obviously the broken wallet).
It seems like a question one should ask and one that should not be dismissed as merely "ignorant" or with the irrelevant assertion that the site is now owned by someone else when what matters is who built it in the first place and if that code is still in use.
I've only looked into this a little bit, but the more information I find the more it seems like the relationship between Mt. Gox and Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange has been greatly exaggerated, perhaps to a downright comical extent. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7215940
If someone asks a question based on a false premise by assuming that a site in question ever traded certain things and was not only ever Bitcoin-based, the question is, does that person not know what they're talking about? The answer would appear to be yes.
There's a page that announces that they are developing a site back in 2007, then the project was scrapped, and some years later the domain was reused. The implication by making this comment is that somehow the backend was reused and this is the cause for their current faults, which is just stupid on so many levels.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070624204743/http://mtgox.com/...
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/11/mtgox/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt.Gox
So I'll take facts over your random unfounded objections any day.
Wired gets strung up here regularly for sensationalization.
While evidential, neither of your sources can be considered _factual_. In fact, the first four references of your wikipedia article all point to... that article in Wired, which doesn't attribute its sources at all.
So you've got one possible source- not the definition of a public story.
Mind you, I have no stake in this matter. I don't care for Magic or Bitcoins. I'm just here as a philosopher.
How and why did you create Mt. Gox?
At that point there wasn’t a good way to buy and sell Bitcoins and I wanted to buy some. So, as a side project, I made Mt. Gox and bought my first Bitcoins there. As the company started to take off, I sold it.
It's ridiculous to even begin to think that there's any similarities between the sites outside of the domain name and it's owner.
If you don't agree, then don't agree, I don't care.
And I still disagree, plenty of the site could have been re-used because if the new code uses the same core frameworks, a home-brew persistence framework for example, it could have the same core issues; issues that may not have mattered on a trading card site but matter greatly when money is involved, rounding problems, lack of transactions, stupid architectural choices like MongoDb, who knows.
If you don't agree, I don't care. I've been doing this for 15 years, I trust my own expertise far more than some disagreeable person on the internet.
We cannot know what was reused from what, absent new evidence, as there is no public example of an actual MtG trading card site that I can find anywhere, just a quick note saying that the idea was "patent pending" and that one might someday be found there until a Bitcoin exchange popped up.
I would be quite interested if anyone has new evidence. The record, so far, is a bit thin. Perhaps the Jed McCaleb has a Github or other public repository containing items of interest?
Before the Wired article, the Wiki article implies that the site was an operating Magic card exchange, but the citation is a link to the Internet Archive's copy of the stub page, with absolutely nothing there to substantiate the idea that it was actually an online exchange. The Wired article appeared later and is unsourced, but could plausibly have taken the Wiki article's unsupported statement at face value. Then just the other day (February 9) the Wiki page was edited by a user named Agyle to use the Wired article instead of the Wayback Machine reference.
"But then McCaleb turned [Mt. Gox] into a website where people could exchange cash for bitcoins, a digital currency that had only just found its way onto the internet, and just as the exchange started to take off, he sold it to Karpeles."
Are you saying McCaleb started with a fresh codebase and just hosted it on the same domain? I haven't seen any evidence to support that. But I also don't understand what support for your claims you think that archive.org link provides. Just that a card exchange was hosted there for several years?
Journalists seem fundamentally incapable of writing the truth. You can see that it's not a "fact" by simply inspecting the internet archive history of the site. It was never a functioning card exchange.
And none of their problems really seem to follow from "having been a card exchange". Shitty security isn't even unheard of from proper banks (bank of America session overlap anyone?), and the current issue has to do with their custom bitcoin wallet which is definitely unrelated.
I also don't think being in over your head or having architectural issues is a crime - it's the default state for startups, especially ones trying to keep up with big growth.
Putting shit on mtgox for being the quintessential bootstrapped startup, on HN, is just stupid.
While this statement is usually true, let's not generalize. There are some kinds of business or services where you are doing a disservice to the world by being in over your head.
Example: If you decide to "disrupt" home construction and sidestep the various annoying and taxing construction regulations. You simply must not go around selling houses to people unless you are actually very, very confident that you are not building a dangerous product.
Same thing for making food that people eat, pacemakers, radiation devices, and taking people's money to safeguard. It's not a crime to make mistakes that nobody with reasonable experience could foresee, but it is absolutely wrong to make avoidable mistakes that hurt your customers due to industry inexperience.
Firstly it's not simply a domain change. There's very good reason to believe that the architectural problems MTGox are facing today may be due in part to re-using not fit-for-purpose code, from the earlier revision of their product. Yes it never went live, and yes it's new people now; both of those things are irrelevant unless there was a complete code re-write at some point.
On to your next point, there certainly is a problem with being in over your head if you're dealing with financial trading. Some industries are not suited to amateur attempts, period. Think of the amount of litigation MTGox are opening themselves up to, not just in terms of people who use them, but based on the wider impact to the BTC community if they really stuff things up. Not good if they can't show due dilligence beyond "LOL we're a startup, what do you expect?".
I just explained why it does mean something, so we simply disagree.
And that trading currencies is a completely different task than trading cards.
I've seen people retrofitting their CMSes to do everything. Hell, I even did this myself with my hobby game engine. It's common for programmers.
Fuck off then.
MtGox has more traffic than HN, survived immense press and growth over the last couple years as bitcoin rose into mainstream popularity, and did so as a market leader for most of that time. That alone should tell you very little if any source remains, it's not like that dude's beta that apparently never even launched was likely to just scale through several orders of magnitude more traffic and solve every problem and new or different need along the way.
Fantasy sounds like exactly the right term. Unless you have any proof. Do you?
Right -- you can use Magic cards to play a fun game, as well as to try to make speculative bets. Bitcoins are that, minus the fun.
The whole Bitcoin network started with outsiders, it grew because of outsiders, because of hobbyists. The existing institutions saw no value in it; saw no point in it; saw a laughable attempt at creating competition with their established system.
Hating on Mt. Gox for doing something risky -and taking blows for it along the way- is ridiculous, and this schadenfreude over it being in a tight spot now speaks more to your character than it does the company.
Odd as it might sound it was probably harder for a traditional software company to make the jump because bug free != fun. The idea of coming up with fun and balanced rule systems has a lot to do with play testing which is not part of the traditional software dev process. Blizzard is probably the best example where fun was required before they where willing to ship something sadly that seems to have disappeared after the merger.
AFAIK, Nintendo's card-gaming business was only the production of Hanafuda and French-style decks. It didn't design any new games itself.
"You can't honestly think a computer company had the correct platform to just become a a major player in the music industry and not suffer any technical debt or architectural issues..."
But Apple was OK.
(Also I hear it's written in Personal Home Page)
The real failure is the way this company operates, not how it gained its popularity. I am shocked that gox still has 8-9x the volume of btc-e[1] after at least 3 avoidable long term service interruptions. The real sardonic mockery should be directed at the clowns who still have their coins and dollars on gox's one server.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raytheon [1] assuming the trade volume isn't being manipulated somehow
Raytheon didn't suddenly jump or "pivot"from domestic appliances to missiles.
They acquired Hughes Aircraft and its 40,000 employees of expertise in the mid-1990s, by which time Raytheon was involved in nuclear power, general aviation ( Beech Aircraft ), polymers, pharma...
Hughes brought with it the major 'brands' of Tomahawk and AMRAAM.
Well you don't want either to go off accidentally :>
And there have been serious questions about it's credibility in all that time as well.
Which might also be a reasonable stance.
As an outsider it seems like a bias to prevent the perception of BitCoin's value being impacted by a bad large exchange. CoinDesk is basically acting as regulator and transparency provider, which may be exactly what is needed in the realm of crypto-currencies as the community is supposed to be self regulating.
Many people do not believe self-regulation is possible without government's monopoly on the use of force, but many theorists do believe it is possible (and likely). It'll be interesting to see how this all shakes out.
See: http://www.coindesk.com/gavin-andresen-jeff-garzik-mt-gox-wr...
Selection bias anyone?