If a magic card trading site starts trading bitcoins using mostly it's existing infrastructure and then sells to someone else, the question is are the new owners still using that hacked together infrastructure? The answer would appear to be yes.
Judging by the history that appears on the Wayback Machine, there may never have been any card trading infrastructure to begin with. There are a few blips of activity on the domain back in 2007, but it doesn't look like the site ever even came close to going live. All that ever went up was a beta disclaimer and a contact email, but no sign of any actual content, not even any real static content. Next activity's in 2009, when the domain began hosting an online strategy game called Far Wilds. That was apparently an abortive project, too, because nothing happens again until Mt. Gox's launch in February 2011.
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.
You are correct. As far as I can tell, they never launched as a trading card website. It's unclear if the code is related or not. There's a debate down thread about this and the only thing on it seems to be the wired article. So we don't really know what the code base started as (which is of course the real question, not what the site launched as).
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 still think that there's little reason to believe there was ever any card trading code to base Mt. Gox on in the first place.
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 a magic card trading site starts trading bitcoins using mostly it's existing infrastructure and then sells to someone else, the question is are the new owners still using that hacked together infrastructure?
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.
Not the OP, but no, no it's not. That Gox used to be a trading site for game cards very much speaks to their being unprepared for the difficulty of being a currency exchange. You can't honestly think a trading card site had the correct platform to just become a currency exchange and not suffer any technical debt or architectural issues from not being built as a currency exchange from the beginning.
At no point did Mt Gox ever run a service trading playing cards. Please stop spreading crap when you've clearly done no research into the matter yourself. They might have faults but this is not one of them.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Your argument seems to be "reusing trading-card code for a currency exchange is stupid and would result in a terrible, bug-ridden product." Mt.Gox is terrible and bug-ridden. I'm not clear what you're disagreeing with.
Looking at archive.org, there's nothing but a "contact us / patent pending" text-only web page that exists of the hypothetical MtG trading card site. Also, the Wikipedia assertion appears to have been copied from Wired, potentially a seed for citogenesis[1], as Wired is the one and only source of this claim and we have no supporting evidence.
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?
Interestingly, if you go back and look through the Wikipedia page's history, you can see what appears to be exactly that process happening.
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.
Trading cards are fungible, and it's not hard to build an exchange where current price is based on the last price paid. There's no fundamental reason that trading cards couldn't be used as a currency if enough people agreed about their convertibility, for that matter. Do you know for a fact that the code base was written from scratch, or are you just assuming that it must have been?
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?
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?
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.
That Gox used to be something else means nothing. What matters is what it is - and that is not a trading card site. Millions of domains were something else. Many of us have pivoted from one idea to the next while salvaging what we can or what we learned.
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.
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.
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.
This is weirdly incorrect for a number of reasons.
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?".
If they're still using the source code from 2010 when it was a completely different business with a completely different name with a completely different purpose owned by a completely different person, according to the Wikipedia link you posted.
You're pretending this was just a domain name sale; that's not what the public story is, the story is that it was re-purposed by the original owner who then sold it to the current owners so there's every reason to believe it's based on the original code.
In this fantasy is the surviving code supposed to be mission critical stuff that magically applied to the completely different second business and survived the years and growth since 2011?
Well, I have a hobby project for trading X, then I decide I want to have a project for trading Y; isn't this an obvious instinct to modify the one I'm already working on to fit a new purpose, instead of starting for scratch? If the author didn't know much about complexities of money trade, I'm pretty sure he did just that.
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.
Thank you for some common fucking sense; that's exactly what programmers do and exactly what would have happened. Gox most certainly has code originally built for a card game.
Numerous people have posted information with sources that directly conflicts with most of your opinions, while you ride on this apparent "4+ years ago some dude maybe reused some source" for whatever that's even supposed to mean.
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?
It's not like the current exchanges was going to adopt Bitcoin at that time. Mt. Gox was as far as I'm concerned one of the more qualified and logical places for a large exchange to start.
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.
Well, Nintendo started as a playing card company, and managed to overcome the technical debt and architectural issues of becoming a globally successful video game company. And I kind of like how "Mt Gox" is alliterative with "Fort Knox". That all said, I wouldn't dream of using them.
It's just amusing that two companies that we're all aware of had (attempted to) take a big pivot into high-tech from the playing/trading card industry, of all places. No doubt you're correct, and the extent to which Mt Gox having figured that "hey, we're kind of running an exchange already" actually helped them is about the same as for Nintendo thinking 40 years ago "hey, we already know about the game market".
Come to think of it Nintendo probably did gain a lot by having a card gaming background.
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.
> 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.
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..."
Surviving technical challenges doesn't mean you didn't suffer them. Apple is an example that supports my point, not an argument against it. I didn't say Gox wouldn't survive the challenge. So you basically have no point.
There's also a difference between pivoting a company and starting projects from scratch and repurposing the project, which I think gnaritas believes happened here.
As any rational programmer would have done. The odds that this guy coded the Gox trading engine from scratch rather than reusing his existing code for trading cards is slim to none; that's just not how programmers behave.
They were never under any obligation to use mtgox.com for their original idea for all eternity, and on HN of all places there is no shame in pivoting to a better idea.
There's no shame in a pivot, but there's also valid reason to criticize a pivot to something you can't handle. Trading cards is not like trading currencies.
The person who started the card-trading site is not the same person who currently owns MtGox. The original owner did convert it into a Bitcoin exchange, but then sold early on (I believe pre-2011 spike) to let someone else deal with the hassles.
A pivot from a real-time exchange to a real-time exchange isn't that hard. They've had 2 years to implement proper security and safeguards. It's not like going from, say, refrigerators to cruise missiles[0].
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.
"It's not like going from, say, refrigerators to cruise missiles"
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.
Is it correct to write off a major currency exchange because they are meeting CoinDesk's own requirements? Especially when it's the 3rd largest exchange?
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.
Yes. That's exactly why they HAVE requirements for inclusion: to determine which exchanges to include. And in this case the criteria seem quite reasonable (things like allowing people to take money out) and their lack may indicate that the prices are not representative.
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.
I'm glad to see they're not the biggest player anymore. Their latest shenanigans are probably to cause a big crash but not a complete chaos (hopefully).
About time. There's long been a "MtGox price" and a "real price", and a price index should not include MtGox unless and until they're liquid enough not to distort the price.
It seems like MtGox is dealing with a technical issue that all the exchanges face. From other exchanges I've received unclear, pretty floppy emails, and some just plain ignore the issue. MtGox isn't handling it particularly well, but isn't this something positive?
