Re:Namecheap live chat social engineering leads to loss of 2...
by cdr on Tuesday April 12, 2016 @06:35PM
(#11484175)
MTGOX was purchased as a domain name for a possible MTG exchange, but it never went further than a domain name. There was never even a site.
Re:Namecheap live chat social engineering leads to loss of 2...
by kbenson on Tuesday April 12, 2016 @07:06PM
(#11484368)
Are you sure? Wikipedia[1] seems to indicate it at least got into a beta, but it also implies that the domain was what was reused for the bitcoin exchange, not the code base. That said, the references on wikipedia point to the Internet Archive, which shows a placeholder page that says it's in beta, but there's little there to indicate there was ever anything working. It also says it was used to advertise another card game later, but that was just a link to another domain.
I guess that's a long-winded way of saying you are probably right.
Then again, bitcoins were worth so little in 2010 that I could imagine the account security on exchanges back then being comparable to hobbiest exchange sites, so the spirit of the comment may be valid even if the specific example falls down. :/
You want to know how bad it can break down? I imagine the worst case scenario, for so many reasons, actually happened and was mtgox.com. It started out as a Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange (from what I understand) before it became the now infamous Bitcoin exchange that was hacked[1] and massive amounts of money was stolen. I don't know for a fact that old accounts before the pivot to Bitcoin still existed and worked, but it's not inconceivable that they would. One hopes they adopted much better security compared to when they were a trading card exchange (if it wasn't already exceptional at that time), but there could very well have been a time when it was gaining traction for financial type services but didn't have good account safeguards.
1: Or whatever. From what I remember that's a story convoluted and with enough conspiracy theories it's worth a movie.