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.

Even worse, because the new owners probably don't have a clue about decisions that resulted in the original ifrastructure.

Even worse than that because the new owners do not do robust engineering themselves; multiplying fragility by fragility.

By the way, what is the correct way to pronounce "Mt. Gox" ? is it "mount gox" or "m-t-gox" or what?

I always call it 'mount gox'. Whether it is the correct way or not I do not know. :-)