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The public story says otherwise. http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/11/mtgox/ http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/11/mtgox/ http://en.wikipedia.o

The public story says otherwise. http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/11/mtgox/ http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/11/mtgox/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt.Gox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt.Gox So I'll take facts over your random unfounded objections any day.

diydsp 13y ago
> facts > wired 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.
nwh 13y ago
That story makes no sense at all. They started developing an exchange for cards in 2007, then somehow modified the system to work with Bitcoin four years later? There's absolutely no similarity between those services. I provided a reference to archive.org for the date I mentioned, and you can verify that no such service ever existed until the domain was repurposed in 2011. 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.
- bmm6o 13y ago
  Do you have additional insight beyond what the Wired story says? "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?
  - nwh 13y ago
    There's no evidence to suggest any code reuse, much less 7 years later. The card exchange never existed in a usable public form, it's just a page saying to contact them. What code could possibly be reused between the services had there not been a 4 year gap?
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
- gnaritas 13y ago
  You're free to hold that belief, I don't agree. The public story seems very clear to me that the original owner pivoted to become a bitcoin exchanges and then sold to the current owners. It's reasonable to believe it's based on the original code for trading cards. If you don't agree, then don't agree, I don't care.
  - nwh 13y ago
    Please explain the similarities in the backend to me. Trading cards is basically an online store, nothing like Bitcoin and nothing like a currency exchange. The similarities begin and end in the name.
    - gnaritas 13y ago
      Are you a programmer? I am, and I damn well know that every programmer reuses code between his own projects and both the original site and the current site were originally written by the same guy, he pivoted. If you don't think he reused any code you're just being foolish.
      - nwh 13y ago
        I am, but there's no code to reuse in this situation. Maybe some scraps of user authentication code, all the rest is completely different. What you're describing is like trying to adapt a VW Beatle to tow cruise ships, sure you could maybe reuse the steering wheel, but why would you want to when you could build one better suited for the job?
        gnaritas 13y ago
        Then disagree with me and be done with it and stop f'ing arguing when it's clear what I believe and why. 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.
gwern 13y ago
Besides the complete absence of any contemporary evidence that MtGox ever sold Magic cards, there's the silence in all McCaleb materials. For example, https://ripple.com/blog/interview-with-jed-mccaleb-inventor-of-the-ripple-protocol-and-co-founder-of-opencoin/ https://ripple.com/blog/interview-with-jed-mccaleb-inventor-... 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. 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?
kalleboo 13y ago
Any article I've ever read involving something I have knowledge about had fundamental errors. 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.

diydsp 13y ago

> facts > wired 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.

nwh 13y ago

That story makes no sense at all. They started developing an exchange for cards in 2007, then somehow modified the system to work with Bitcoin four years later? There's absolutely no similarity between those services. I provided a reference to archive.org for the date I mentioned, and you can verify that no such service ever existed until the domain was repurposed in 2011. 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.

bmm6o 13y ago
Do you have additional insight beyond what the Wired story says? "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?
- nwh 13y ago
  There's no evidence to suggest any code reuse, much less 7 years later. The card exchange never existed in a usable public form, it's just a page saying to contact them. What code could possibly be reused between the services had there not been a 4 year gap?
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
gnaritas 13y ago
You're free to hold that belief, I don't agree. The public story seems very clear to me that the original owner pivoted to become a bitcoin exchanges and then sold to the current owners. It's reasonable to believe it's based on the original code for trading cards. If you don't agree, then don't agree, I don't care.
- nwh 13y ago
  Please explain the similarities in the backend to me. Trading cards is basically an online store, nothing like Bitcoin and nothing like a currency exchange. The similarities begin and end in the name.
  - gnaritas 13y ago
    Are you a programmer? I am, and I damn well know that every programmer reuses code between his own projects and both the original site and the current site were originally written by the same guy, he pivoted. If you don't think he reused any code you're just being foolish.
    - nwh 13y ago
      I am, but there's no code to reuse in this situation. Maybe some scraps of user authentication code, all the rest is completely different. What you're describing is like trying to adapt a VW Beatle to tow cruise ships, sure you could maybe reuse the steering wheel, but why would you want to when you could build one better suited for the job?
      - gnaritas 13y ago
        Then disagree with me and be done with it and stop f'ing arguing when it's clear what I believe and why. 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.

gwern 13y ago

Besides the complete absence of any contemporary evidence that MtGox ever sold Magic cards, there's the silence in all McCaleb materials. For example, https://ripple.com/blog/interview-with-jed-mccaleb-inventor-of-the-ripple-protocol-and-co-founder-of-opencoin/ https://ripple.com/blog/interview-with-jed-mccaleb-inventor-... 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. 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?

kalleboo 13y ago

Any article I've ever read involving something I have knowledge about had fundamental errors. 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.