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This is pretty minor, but I'm proposing changing the name of this article to Mt. Gox (with a space) rather than Mt.Gox, and using that spelling within the article except when referring to the full corporation name. Most mainstream media seem to favor Mt. Gox, with some notable exceptions that alternate inconsistently between that and Mt.Gox:
Among their press releases, the company referred to itself as Mt.Gox consistently in early 2013. By April 2013, they had switched to using Mt. Gox consistently, except when using the company's full legal name "Mt.Gox Co. Ltd." From October until now they've switched to using MtGox consistently, except when using the full legal name "Mt.Gox Co. Ltd." Their logo looks like "MT.GOX", but since it's an image I'd view that as not relevant.
There's no clearly "right" answer, and I'm pretty sure opinions will differ; I think the best we can do is go with a majority, so please post your opinion.
–– Agyle ( talk) 23:53, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
Mt Gox is having a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. They stopped all withdrawals on Friday, which was newsworthy enough to get them 117 articles in Google News. Just about every major financial news service worldwide, (Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, South China Morning Post, Sydney Morning Herald, Reuters, even Russia Today) covered this event. Mt. Gox announced they would be making another announcement on Monday. It's already Monday afternoon in Japan. No announcement yet. Expect extensive news coverage in the Western press on Monday. -- John Nagle ( talk) 05:17, 10 February 2014 (UTC)
The supporting evidence for the idea that MtGox ever had a trading card trading website appears to be an Archive.org stub saying that it was 'under construction', but no public evidence of a working site at that address has been identified. On Archive.org it appears to go from stub page claiming that an MtG site would someday come out to a Bitcoin exchange. It appears that the current Wired citation for that traces back to an old Wikipedia edit, which traces back to the Archive.org stub. In other words, there is currently no evidence that a Magic: the Gathering website ever existed in any working form at MtGox, even though the "patent pending" stub page makes it appear that it was originally intended to be one. It's probably not terribly important, but it may be an example of citogenesis as it's becoming a more widely used piece of trivia by news articles. 72.223.6.166 ( talk) 20:52, 13 February 2014 (UTC)
The current version of the article states:
reference to the Wired article http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/11/mtgox/ which was published very recently (why is there no older source?), just in 6 November 2013 (~2 years after the sale by McCaleb, approximately 4 years after the supposed Magic sales would've happened), which says
'Unemployed' seems like a questionable way to describe McCaleb, who is a busy talented guy who has been involved in all sorts of projects (eDonkey, The Far Wilds, Mtgox, Opencoin/Ripple, angel investing etc), but that aside, the description of Mtgox is just flat background assertion: it's not attributed to Karpeles or anyone. So the first shade of doubt creeps in: what made the Wired writers think this?
If we look at the last version of the WP article before that Wired article, https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Mt.Gox&action=edit&oldid=579013088 We find that the intro makes the claim without any citation: "Mt.Gox was established in 2009 as a [[trading card]] exchange, but rebranded itself in 2010 as a bitcoin business and quickly became a dominant player in the field of Bitcoin exchanges." The history section expands a little more:
This is important, because this sounds just like the Wired summary. (Gosh, mainstream media like Wired cribbing from Wikipedia for background, and repeating its mistakes? I'm sure that's never happened before - Wired has such a universal reputation for accuracy and factchecking, right?)
But the reference provided in this version does not support the claim being made. If you look at that IA link, what Mtgox actually said was
No links to logins or signups, no fancy web design, just a short textual summary and a disclaimer. Mtgox.com was not selling anything at all in 2007. At most it was a domain and email address, perhaps put out there to gauge interest in the idea (if you look at the page source, it's not pure text: it had Google Analytics tracking setup). 'Beta' meant just that: not available to the public.
Mtgox.com was registered 2 January 2007, a WHOIS lookup can tell you. If we look at Mtgox.com's IA history in general ( https://web.archive.org/web/20070501000000*/http://mtgox.com), what do we see? A few cached copies from 2007, an entire year with no version available, then in all of 2009 1 version. Is this 2009 version the promised Magic exchange? 2 years is enough time to code up a working exchange, one might think, given how quickly McCaleb was able to put up Mtgox from when he says he first heard of Bitcoin. But when we look at https://web.archive.org/web/20090812073342/http://www.mtgox.com/ what do we see?
This has nothing whatsoever to do with a Magic card exchange. Then in 2010, Mtgox.com mysteriously disappears again for a protracted period, and finally resurfaces in February 2011 ( https://web.archive.org/web/20110203031942/http://mtgox.com/) as the Bitcoin exchange we all know today.
So. In 2007, Mtgox.com was not trading cards. In 2008, it is mysteriously gone. In 2009, it was not trading cards but promoting a strategy game. In 2010, it was again mysteriously gone. In 2011, it was trading, but bitcoins.
What are we to make of it? Perhaps the Magic exchange operated in the interrregnums, selling in 2008, shutting down, starting back up in 2010, and shutting down again? The problem is that gaps like this in the IA, I know from past experience, generally are not mysterious failures of the IA to archive a site (the IA's coverage has improved considerably over the years), but generally indicate the site itself was unavailable for archiving. Unfortunately, the IA does not make logs indicating failed crawls available, so in theory these gaps could be because a IA server crashed and took copies with it or something like that. Very unlikely, IMO, but possible.
Fortunately, you don't need to take my word for it: I have been able to find a second uptime source, a DomainTools report on Mtgox.com: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/182368464/MtgOx-com-2013-12-12.pdf DomainTools does report why it has only the snapshots it has: the domain was simply unhosted in those years. Resolving the domain name to a server failed in 2008 and 2010 ie there was no site then.
So, when did Mtgox.com sell Magic cards? The domain was created in 2007. It didn't sell cards in 2007. There were no active servers in 2008. It was being used for promotion of Far Wilds in 2009. There were no active servers in 2010. It was being used for Bitcoin 2011-now. So don't give me the Wired crap: when did Mtgox sell Magic cards?
Some websites would offer on handling this domain matters and they claim to be experts on this. There are many local services like this website; Birmingham online marketer. Is it ok to let this type of website get a full copy of our host and share servers?
Can we find any mention by anyone ever of having bought or sold Magic cards on Mtgox? I looked in Google using the following query to try to cut down on the echo chamber of Wired/Wikipedia references: (mtgox OR "mt gox" OR "mt.gox") magic cards -wiki -wired; further, I time-limited it to 1/1/2007 - 1/1/2011.
You will be unsurprised to find that there is not a single clear reference. Only the usual "omg I just learned Mtgox used to be a Magic exchange!" echo chamber. (Why do we know Mtgox used to sell Magic cards? Well, everyone says so...)
Well, OK, maybe no one in the world discussed their use of the Magic exchange even though Magic players are geeks who love discussing the topic online. Fortunately, the IA also has copies of the early 2010 blog posts by McCaleb discussing Bitcoin and Mtgox (eg https://web.archive.org/web/20101225014056/http://mtgox.com/blog/?m=201011 ). Surely we will find references there to how he decided to pivot to Bitcoin and abandon his tightlipped yet loyal Magic users? But all the titles refer to Bitcoin exclusively, and the surviving blog posts are pure Bitcoin.
McCaleb also had an account on Bitcointalk, of course. Perhaps in a more informal context he explains his abandonment of Magic? Let's look at his posts https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=489;sa=showPosts ; from his final post under that account:
Nope. Hm, how about the 18 July 2010 post where he announced the existence of Mtgox https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=444.msg3866#msg3866 ?
Nope. Well, there's 10 pages of posts, maybe he mentions 'Magic' elsewhere? Some C-fs later... nope! Oh, and his personal Bitcointalk account ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=5322) does have one hit for the word "magic":
Oops.
OK, so maybe the official Mtgox blog and official account and personal account never mention it. Here's an interview with McCaleb ( http://ripple.com/blog/interview-with-jed-mccaleb-inventor-of-the-ripple-protocol-and-co-founder-of-opencoin/) which asks exactly the question we want to know:
Note what is completely unmentioned there: any evidence that Mt. Gox was made for any reason other than Bitcoins. If Mt Gox was an operating Magic card exchange, isn't that a really strange way to describe its history?
What happened was this: McCaleb was interested in card games, and thought he might write a Magic card exchange. He bought a domain name for like $8, put up a landing page to gauge interest, and eventually abandoned the project - perhaps there were minimal emails or traffic from potential users, perhaps the coding was more difficult than he expected, perhaps he became too busy with Far Wilds, whatever. His server lapsed, but he held onto the domain, maybe because he prepaid. When Far Wilds went public, he recycled the domain for documentation. Far Wilds has its own domain now (thefarwilds.com) and so perhaps to keep things consistent, he took down the mtgox.com site. Years later, he heard about Bitcoin, thought it was a great idea but a currency needed an exchange, and used a domain he had lying around. When people asked what 'mtgox' stood for, he explained the quirky origin of the domain name, which could be confirmed by checking the IA; as Mtgox became more popular and more people wondered what it stood for, the story gradually became corrupted from the complex true version "I bought it intending to set up a Magic card exchange" to the simpler "Mtgox was a card exchange", and from there on, people either repeated what they'd heard/read elsewhere or they cited the IA version and carelessly ignored how it specifically said the exchange was not yet functional and assumed it had been functional at some point.
So, I don't know what to say to anyone who isn't persuaded at this point. There's not a scrap of primary source evidence I've found after quite a bit of digging (the above is just the summary), even thought there should be tons of primary sources on it. It's all bald assertion or clear misinterpretation of an old landing page, given respectability by constant repetition and osmosis into trusted sources like Wikipedia.
Fortunately, this is not some distant historical problem. All the people involved are still alive. I've emailed McCaleb for a comment on this question: after all, he should know. -- Gwern (contribs) 22:00 16 February 2014 (GMT)
The lede, but not the whole article, has been changed from "is an exchange" to "was an exchange". This may be premature, but not improper; the latest Forbes article is titled "Once Mighty Bitcoin Exchange Mt. Gox Is Offline, Likely Dead" [5]. So we do have a reliable source. We don't have to track this minute by minute; within 24 hours, we should have more solid info. Definitely a "current event" now, and edits should be made cautiously. People will be checking Wikipedia for info. -- John Nagle ( talk) 05:37, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
I removed the "closed" date in the Infobox, and changed past tense "Mt. Gox was..." back to present tense. John said it "may be premature, but not improper", based on Forbes article title "Once Mighty Bitcoin Exchange Mt. Gox Is Offline, Likely Dead". I disagree that it's not improper. Likely dead is not dead. (I'm reminded of Billy Crystal, “There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.”) Giving a closed date and using the past tense are saying that the site/company/service is dead. All major news sources I've seen are still using the present tense to describe the company, and we should follow reliable sources, not exaggerate the claims of a single attention-grabbing headline. Agyle ( talk) 12:11, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
for a period of time the sites page source read they were going to put an announce of an acquisition. I need a valid source to prove this (Can anyone find an MSM that identified that.
Now the site just says In the event of recent news reports and the potential repercussions on MtGoxs operations and the market, a decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being in order to protect the site and our users. We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly. Best regards MtGox Team<
216.58.88.101 ( talk) 15:55, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
The graph is using a log scale, which greatly hides the actual value changes, especially given the small size. There is no visible labeling indicating that it is a logarithmic scale when used in the main article. This should be using a plain 2 or 1 year median history instead.
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg730ztgMzm1g10zm2g25 http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg360ztgMzm1g10zm2g25
Can someone link through to the Mark Karpeles article? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Squirelewis ( talk • contribs) 16:44, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
96.245.254.175 ( talk) 03:19, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
I just noticed that on 25 February the Wall Street Journal had reported here (behind a paywall) "Mt. Gox Receives Subpoena From Federal Prosecutor: Source". Reuters includes more or less the same content here. - 84user ( talk) 12:01, 28 February 2014 (UTC) CNBC has a little more detail: "the office of Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara was seeking information from businesses dealing in bitcoin to discover how they were dealing with the cyberattacks." - 84user ( talk) 12:13, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
I changed the lede to point out that the alleged "theft" is just a rumor. There's a leaked document that may be faked and some comments on Internet Relay Chat behind it. That's all. The two cited articles actually say "Mt.Gox is blaming a costly computer hack for its current troubles. But in reality, the company was in dire financial straits long before that." [9] and "But simply allowing some bitcoins to be stolen through a bad implementation of the bitcoin protocol wouldn’t be enough to lead to the sort of collapse that MtGox has seen. That would also require serious lapses in how the company audited its accounts, and how it dealt with the discovery that it was in financial trouble." [10]. The bankruptcy court will have to sort this out. -- John Nagle ( talk) 19:01, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
According to http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20140310-712183.html , posted on March 10, 2014, "Tibanne Co. Ltd., a Japanese company founded by Mr. Karpeles, owns 88% of the company. Mt. Gox's software developer, Jed MacCaleb, owns the remaining 12%."
50.74.152.2 ( talk) 07:51, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
I think the infobox should be the company infobox, not the exchange infobox, because Mt.Gox was not an exchange, it was a company running an online auction website. Bitcoin "exchanges" have very little in common with other financial exchanges. Danrok ( talk) 19:13, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
Mt. Gox's legal problems are broadening. The Tokyo bankruptcy case suddenly went in a new direction when a creditor filed a petition noting that unexplained Bitcoin transactions were occurring on Mt. Gox accounts. [11] Former Mt. Gox employees are revealing details of problems several years old. [12]. The U.S. bankruptcy judge insists on Mark Karpeles personally appearing in Dallas for a deposition on April 17th if Mt. Gox is to get US bankruptcy protection. [13] Tokyo police and the bankruptcy supervisor are working to figure out where the money went. [14] -- John Nagle ( talk) 07:09, 3 April 2014 (UTC)
re: http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Mt._Gox&diff=603600454&oldid=603492525
I would like to add the following to the lede:
Mt. Gox, an acronym for Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange, [1] [2] [3]
Does anyone object or agree?
24.97.201.230 (
talk)
03:08, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
Yes, I disagree. Did the site ever advertise itself as "Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange" during the period when it was notable (e.g. as a Bitcoin bank)? My understanding is no, and that it didn't even do any MTGO trading at all in that period. This is trivia about how the name was formed, and it's actively misleading for what the site ended up really being. *To be clear* I'm not saying it be taken out of the article - it should just be in the History section. Unless you think that detailed origin stories should be mentioned in the lede about, say, Kodak? That article's a good example - there's a rather famous name origin story there, but it's in the article itself, not in the lede, because it just isn't relevant enough. SnowFire ( talk) 18:08, 14 April 2014 (UTC)
Mt. Gox is going from "civil rehabilitation" to straight bankruptcy and liquidation. [15]. Right now there's just basic press coverage of that. Details in tomorrow's financial press, probably. -- John Nagle ( talk) 06:53, 16 April 2014 (UTC)
What's a cracker? Do you mean a hacker??? 71.139.169.186 ( talk) 19:54, 18 April 2014 (UTC)
http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Mt._Gox&diff=605170736&oldid=605161573
Why were my totally legitimate edits reverted? -- 24.97.201.230 ( talk) 18:35, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for responding. My two changes were:
1) I wikified K.K. (to go to
Kabushiki gaisha as that's what K.K. stands for)
http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Mt._Gox&diff=605161447&oldid=605114677
2) moving the ) so that the source was outside of the brackets
http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Mt._Gox&diff=605161573&oldid=605161447
So I still don't know the reason that my edits were reverted (since I didn't make a statement and I don't see how either of my small edits are contradicting anything). -- 24.97.201.230 ( talk) 19:06, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
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Is it possible that the name was also designed to imitate the similarly financial Fort Knox? Cup o’ Java ( talk • edits) 23:55, 9 June 2016 (UTC)
Good Lord: [20] Perhaps McCaleb did not get "bored" so much as "offloaded an exchange that already had an 80,000 BTC hole in the accounts" - David Gerard ( talk) 23:48, 29 October 2016 (UTC)
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"In October 2011, about two dozen transactions appeared in the block chain (Block 150951)[31] that sent a total of 2,609 BTC to invalid addresses. As no private key could ever be assigned to them, these bitcoins were effectively lost. While the standard client would check for such an error and reject the transactions, nodes on the network would not, exposing a weakness in the protocol."
What does this have to do with Mt. Gox? This belongs into the Bitcoin article if it's not there already. 87.93.10.0 ( talk) 11:53, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
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This [21] is a nice source from today's WSJ. Jtbobwaysf ( talk) 08:36, 12 August 2018 (UTC)
A new book has been published on the history of MtGox (Ultimate Catastrophe: How MtGox Lost Half a Billion Dollars and Nearly Killed Bitcoin, ISBN: 979-8858026471. I feel this should be added. 86.3.45.177 ( talk) 17:26, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
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This is pretty minor, but I'm proposing changing the name of this article to Mt. Gox (with a space) rather than Mt.Gox, and using that spelling within the article except when referring to the full corporation name. Most mainstream media seem to favor Mt. Gox, with some notable exceptions that alternate inconsistently between that and Mt.Gox:
Among their press releases, the company referred to itself as Mt.Gox consistently in early 2013. By April 2013, they had switched to using Mt. Gox consistently, except when using the company's full legal name "Mt.Gox Co. Ltd." From October until now they've switched to using MtGox consistently, except when using the full legal name "Mt.Gox Co. Ltd." Their logo looks like "MT.GOX", but since it's an image I'd view that as not relevant.
There's no clearly "right" answer, and I'm pretty sure opinions will differ; I think the best we can do is go with a majority, so please post your opinion.
–– Agyle ( talk) 23:53, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
Mt Gox is having a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. They stopped all withdrawals on Friday, which was newsworthy enough to get them 117 articles in Google News. Just about every major financial news service worldwide, (Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, South China Morning Post, Sydney Morning Herald, Reuters, even Russia Today) covered this event. Mt. Gox announced they would be making another announcement on Monday. It's already Monday afternoon in Japan. No announcement yet. Expect extensive news coverage in the Western press on Monday. -- John Nagle ( talk) 05:17, 10 February 2014 (UTC)
The supporting evidence for the idea that MtGox ever had a trading card trading website appears to be an Archive.org stub saying that it was 'under construction', but no public evidence of a working site at that address has been identified. On Archive.org it appears to go from stub page claiming that an MtG site would someday come out to a Bitcoin exchange. It appears that the current Wired citation for that traces back to an old Wikipedia edit, which traces back to the Archive.org stub. In other words, there is currently no evidence that a Magic: the Gathering website ever existed in any working form at MtGox, even though the "patent pending" stub page makes it appear that it was originally intended to be one. It's probably not terribly important, but it may be an example of citogenesis as it's becoming a more widely used piece of trivia by news articles. 72.223.6.166 ( talk) 20:52, 13 February 2014 (UTC)
The current version of the article states:
reference to the Wired article http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/11/mtgox/ which was published very recently (why is there no older source?), just in 6 November 2013 (~2 years after the sale by McCaleb, approximately 4 years after the supposed Magic sales would've happened), which says
'Unemployed' seems like a questionable way to describe McCaleb, who is a busy talented guy who has been involved in all sorts of projects (eDonkey, The Far Wilds, Mtgox, Opencoin/Ripple, angel investing etc), but that aside, the description of Mtgox is just flat background assertion: it's not attributed to Karpeles or anyone. So the first shade of doubt creeps in: what made the Wired writers think this?
If we look at the last version of the WP article before that Wired article, https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Mt.Gox&action=edit&oldid=579013088 We find that the intro makes the claim without any citation: "Mt.Gox was established in 2009 as a [[trading card]] exchange, but rebranded itself in 2010 as a bitcoin business and quickly became a dominant player in the field of Bitcoin exchanges." The history section expands a little more:
This is important, because this sounds just like the Wired summary. (Gosh, mainstream media like Wired cribbing from Wikipedia for background, and repeating its mistakes? I'm sure that's never happened before - Wired has such a universal reputation for accuracy and factchecking, right?)
But the reference provided in this version does not support the claim being made. If you look at that IA link, what Mtgox actually said was
No links to logins or signups, no fancy web design, just a short textual summary and a disclaimer. Mtgox.com was not selling anything at all in 2007. At most it was a domain and email address, perhaps put out there to gauge interest in the idea (if you look at the page source, it's not pure text: it had Google Analytics tracking setup). 'Beta' meant just that: not available to the public.
Mtgox.com was registered 2 January 2007, a WHOIS lookup can tell you. If we look at Mtgox.com's IA history in general ( https://web.archive.org/web/20070501000000*/http://mtgox.com), what do we see? A few cached copies from 2007, an entire year with no version available, then in all of 2009 1 version. Is this 2009 version the promised Magic exchange? 2 years is enough time to code up a working exchange, one might think, given how quickly McCaleb was able to put up Mtgox from when he says he first heard of Bitcoin. But when we look at https://web.archive.org/web/20090812073342/http://www.mtgox.com/ what do we see?
This has nothing whatsoever to do with a Magic card exchange. Then in 2010, Mtgox.com mysteriously disappears again for a protracted period, and finally resurfaces in February 2011 ( https://web.archive.org/web/20110203031942/http://mtgox.com/) as the Bitcoin exchange we all know today.
So. In 2007, Mtgox.com was not trading cards. In 2008, it is mysteriously gone. In 2009, it was not trading cards but promoting a strategy game. In 2010, it was again mysteriously gone. In 2011, it was trading, but bitcoins.
What are we to make of it? Perhaps the Magic exchange operated in the interrregnums, selling in 2008, shutting down, starting back up in 2010, and shutting down again? The problem is that gaps like this in the IA, I know from past experience, generally are not mysterious failures of the IA to archive a site (the IA's coverage has improved considerably over the years), but generally indicate the site itself was unavailable for archiving. Unfortunately, the IA does not make logs indicating failed crawls available, so in theory these gaps could be because a IA server crashed and took copies with it or something like that. Very unlikely, IMO, but possible.
Fortunately, you don't need to take my word for it: I have been able to find a second uptime source, a DomainTools report on Mtgox.com: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/182368464/MtgOx-com-2013-12-12.pdf DomainTools does report why it has only the snapshots it has: the domain was simply unhosted in those years. Resolving the domain name to a server failed in 2008 and 2010 ie there was no site then.
So, when did Mtgox.com sell Magic cards? The domain was created in 2007. It didn't sell cards in 2007. There were no active servers in 2008. It was being used for promotion of Far Wilds in 2009. There were no active servers in 2010. It was being used for Bitcoin 2011-now. So don't give me the Wired crap: when did Mtgox sell Magic cards?
Some websites would offer on handling this domain matters and they claim to be experts on this. There are many local services like this website; Birmingham online marketer. Is it ok to let this type of website get a full copy of our host and share servers?
Can we find any mention by anyone ever of having bought or sold Magic cards on Mtgox? I looked in Google using the following query to try to cut down on the echo chamber of Wired/Wikipedia references: (mtgox OR "mt gox" OR "mt.gox") magic cards -wiki -wired; further, I time-limited it to 1/1/2007 - 1/1/2011.
You will be unsurprised to find that there is not a single clear reference. Only the usual "omg I just learned Mtgox used to be a Magic exchange!" echo chamber. (Why do we know Mtgox used to sell Magic cards? Well, everyone says so...)
Well, OK, maybe no one in the world discussed their use of the Magic exchange even though Magic players are geeks who love discussing the topic online. Fortunately, the IA also has copies of the early 2010 blog posts by McCaleb discussing Bitcoin and Mtgox (eg https://web.archive.org/web/20101225014056/http://mtgox.com/blog/?m=201011 ). Surely we will find references there to how he decided to pivot to Bitcoin and abandon his tightlipped yet loyal Magic users? But all the titles refer to Bitcoin exclusively, and the surviving blog posts are pure Bitcoin.
McCaleb also had an account on Bitcointalk, of course. Perhaps in a more informal context he explains his abandonment of Magic? Let's look at his posts https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=489;sa=showPosts ; from his final post under that account:
Nope. Hm, how about the 18 July 2010 post where he announced the existence of Mtgox https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=444.msg3866#msg3866 ?
Nope. Well, there's 10 pages of posts, maybe he mentions 'Magic' elsewhere? Some C-fs later... nope! Oh, and his personal Bitcointalk account ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=5322) does have one hit for the word "magic":
Oops.
OK, so maybe the official Mtgox blog and official account and personal account never mention it. Here's an interview with McCaleb ( http://ripple.com/blog/interview-with-jed-mccaleb-inventor-of-the-ripple-protocol-and-co-founder-of-opencoin/) which asks exactly the question we want to know:
Note what is completely unmentioned there: any evidence that Mt. Gox was made for any reason other than Bitcoins. If Mt Gox was an operating Magic card exchange, isn't that a really strange way to describe its history?
What happened was this: McCaleb was interested in card games, and thought he might write a Magic card exchange. He bought a domain name for like $8, put up a landing page to gauge interest, and eventually abandoned the project - perhaps there were minimal emails or traffic from potential users, perhaps the coding was more difficult than he expected, perhaps he became too busy with Far Wilds, whatever. His server lapsed, but he held onto the domain, maybe because he prepaid. When Far Wilds went public, he recycled the domain for documentation. Far Wilds has its own domain now (thefarwilds.com) and so perhaps to keep things consistent, he took down the mtgox.com site. Years later, he heard about Bitcoin, thought it was a great idea but a currency needed an exchange, and used a domain he had lying around. When people asked what 'mtgox' stood for, he explained the quirky origin of the domain name, which could be confirmed by checking the IA; as Mtgox became more popular and more people wondered what it stood for, the story gradually became corrupted from the complex true version "I bought it intending to set up a Magic card exchange" to the simpler "Mtgox was a card exchange", and from there on, people either repeated what they'd heard/read elsewhere or they cited the IA version and carelessly ignored how it specifically said the exchange was not yet functional and assumed it had been functional at some point.
So, I don't know what to say to anyone who isn't persuaded at this point. There's not a scrap of primary source evidence I've found after quite a bit of digging (the above is just the summary), even thought there should be tons of primary sources on it. It's all bald assertion or clear misinterpretation of an old landing page, given respectability by constant repetition and osmosis into trusted sources like Wikipedia.
Fortunately, this is not some distant historical problem. All the people involved are still alive. I've emailed McCaleb for a comment on this question: after all, he should know. -- Gwern (contribs) 22:00 16 February 2014 (GMT)
The lede, but not the whole article, has been changed from "is an exchange" to "was an exchange". This may be premature, but not improper; the latest Forbes article is titled "Once Mighty Bitcoin Exchange Mt. Gox Is Offline, Likely Dead" [5]. So we do have a reliable source. We don't have to track this minute by minute; within 24 hours, we should have more solid info. Definitely a "current event" now, and edits should be made cautiously. People will be checking Wikipedia for info. -- John Nagle ( talk) 05:37, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
I removed the "closed" date in the Infobox, and changed past tense "Mt. Gox was..." back to present tense. John said it "may be premature, but not improper", based on Forbes article title "Once Mighty Bitcoin Exchange Mt. Gox Is Offline, Likely Dead". I disagree that it's not improper. Likely dead is not dead. (I'm reminded of Billy Crystal, “There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.”) Giving a closed date and using the past tense are saying that the site/company/service is dead. All major news sources I've seen are still using the present tense to describe the company, and we should follow reliable sources, not exaggerate the claims of a single attention-grabbing headline. Agyle ( talk) 12:11, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
for a period of time the sites page source read they were going to put an announce of an acquisition. I need a valid source to prove this (Can anyone find an MSM that identified that.
Now the site just says In the event of recent news reports and the potential repercussions on MtGoxs operations and the market, a decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being in order to protect the site and our users. We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly. Best regards MtGox Team<
216.58.88.101 ( talk) 15:55, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
The graph is using a log scale, which greatly hides the actual value changes, especially given the small size. There is no visible labeling indicating that it is a logarithmic scale when used in the main article. This should be using a plain 2 or 1 year median history instead.
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg730ztgMzm1g10zm2g25 http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg360ztgMzm1g10zm2g25
Can someone link through to the Mark Karpeles article? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Squirelewis ( talk • contribs) 16:44, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
96.245.254.175 ( talk) 03:19, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
I just noticed that on 25 February the Wall Street Journal had reported here (behind a paywall) "Mt. Gox Receives Subpoena From Federal Prosecutor: Source". Reuters includes more or less the same content here. - 84user ( talk) 12:01, 28 February 2014 (UTC) CNBC has a little more detail: "the office of Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara was seeking information from businesses dealing in bitcoin to discover how they were dealing with the cyberattacks." - 84user ( talk) 12:13, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
I changed the lede to point out that the alleged "theft" is just a rumor. There's a leaked document that may be faked and some comments on Internet Relay Chat behind it. That's all. The two cited articles actually say "Mt.Gox is blaming a costly computer hack for its current troubles. But in reality, the company was in dire financial straits long before that." [9] and "But simply allowing some bitcoins to be stolen through a bad implementation of the bitcoin protocol wouldn’t be enough to lead to the sort of collapse that MtGox has seen. That would also require serious lapses in how the company audited its accounts, and how it dealt with the discovery that it was in financial trouble." [10]. The bankruptcy court will have to sort this out. -- John Nagle ( talk) 19:01, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
According to http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20140310-712183.html , posted on March 10, 2014, "Tibanne Co. Ltd., a Japanese company founded by Mr. Karpeles, owns 88% of the company. Mt. Gox's software developer, Jed MacCaleb, owns the remaining 12%."
50.74.152.2 ( talk) 07:51, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
I think the infobox should be the company infobox, not the exchange infobox, because Mt.Gox was not an exchange, it was a company running an online auction website. Bitcoin "exchanges" have very little in common with other financial exchanges. Danrok ( talk) 19:13, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
Mt. Gox's legal problems are broadening. The Tokyo bankruptcy case suddenly went in a new direction when a creditor filed a petition noting that unexplained Bitcoin transactions were occurring on Mt. Gox accounts. [11] Former Mt. Gox employees are revealing details of problems several years old. [12]. The U.S. bankruptcy judge insists on Mark Karpeles personally appearing in Dallas for a deposition on April 17th if Mt. Gox is to get US bankruptcy protection. [13] Tokyo police and the bankruptcy supervisor are working to figure out where the money went. [14] -- John Nagle ( talk) 07:09, 3 April 2014 (UTC)
re: http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Mt._Gox&diff=603600454&oldid=603492525
I would like to add the following to the lede:
Mt. Gox, an acronym for Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange, [1] [2] [3]
Does anyone object or agree?
24.97.201.230 (
talk)
03:08, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
Yes, I disagree. Did the site ever advertise itself as "Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange" during the period when it was notable (e.g. as a Bitcoin bank)? My understanding is no, and that it didn't even do any MTGO trading at all in that period. This is trivia about how the name was formed, and it's actively misleading for what the site ended up really being. *To be clear* I'm not saying it be taken out of the article - it should just be in the History section. Unless you think that detailed origin stories should be mentioned in the lede about, say, Kodak? That article's a good example - there's a rather famous name origin story there, but it's in the article itself, not in the lede, because it just isn't relevant enough. SnowFire ( talk) 18:08, 14 April 2014 (UTC)
Mt. Gox is going from "civil rehabilitation" to straight bankruptcy and liquidation. [15]. Right now there's just basic press coverage of that. Details in tomorrow's financial press, probably. -- John Nagle ( talk) 06:53, 16 April 2014 (UTC)
What's a cracker? Do you mean a hacker??? 71.139.169.186 ( talk) 19:54, 18 April 2014 (UTC)
http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Mt._Gox&diff=605170736&oldid=605161573
Why were my totally legitimate edits reverted? -- 24.97.201.230 ( talk) 18:35, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for responding. My two changes were:
1) I wikified K.K. (to go to
Kabushiki gaisha as that's what K.K. stands for)
http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Mt._Gox&diff=605161447&oldid=605114677
2) moving the ) so that the source was outside of the brackets
http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Mt._Gox&diff=605161573&oldid=605161447
So I still don't know the reason that my edits were reverted (since I didn't make a statement and I don't see how either of my small edits are contradicting anything). -- 24.97.201.230 ( talk) 19:06, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
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Is it possible that the name was also designed to imitate the similarly financial Fort Knox? Cup o’ Java ( talk • edits) 23:55, 9 June 2016 (UTC)
Good Lord: [20] Perhaps McCaleb did not get "bored" so much as "offloaded an exchange that already had an 80,000 BTC hole in the accounts" - David Gerard ( talk) 23:48, 29 October 2016 (UTC)
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"In October 2011, about two dozen transactions appeared in the block chain (Block 150951)[31] that sent a total of 2,609 BTC to invalid addresses. As no private key could ever be assigned to them, these bitcoins were effectively lost. While the standard client would check for such an error and reject the transactions, nodes on the network would not, exposing a weakness in the protocol."
What does this have to do with Mt. Gox? This belongs into the Bitcoin article if it's not there already. 87.93.10.0 ( talk) 11:53, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
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This [21] is a nice source from today's WSJ. Jtbobwaysf ( talk) 08:36, 12 August 2018 (UTC)
A new book has been published on the history of MtGox (Ultimate Catastrophe: How MtGox Lost Half a Billion Dollars and Nearly Killed Bitcoin, ISBN: 979-8858026471. I feel this should be added. 86.3.45.177 ( talk) 17:26, 3 December 2023 (UTC)