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Comment by JonathanBeuys | Hacker News Reader

It is not easy to say who is right here.

From the little information in the article, it looks like this is how it went down:

Jump sent an unsolicited email to Dick, offering $2500 to buy the domain.

Dick did not want to sell and phrased that as "The price for wormhole.com is a firm $50000", expecting nobody would want to pay $50k for it.

Can the latter be seen as a binding offer?

Given the sum of the circumstances, my feeling is that it can not. A one-line reply to an unsolicited email with a price 20x the initial offering is not really signaling a serious will to sell.

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No. That’s why contracts exist.

If an email with a number in it was a binding offer, then what is a contract for?

Edit: I see that you edited in an additional paragraph at the end of your comment after my initial reply. If you’re editing a comment after-the-fact, it’s good practice to make it clear for future readers.

Contracts do not have to have any specific form. An email exchange can very well be a contract.

A contract is for selling things that are more complicated than a simple transaction. If you go to the supermarket and buy a sandwich, you don't sign a contract. They stipulate a price, you agree by taking it off the shelf and showing it to the cashier. Then you inform the cashier of your banking details by sliding your creditcard, and your bank and their bank arrange for the actual payment.

In this case, Jump agreed to the price the person set, and then the person didn't give Jump the opportunity to pay. Where I live I'm pretty sure this would have been a binding agreement, though there's definitely some exceptions to that law that might or might not apply here.

On many occasions it’s been upheld that an advertisement is not an offer in a contract. A store cannot be sued over not delivering on an advertisement.

There is a huge difference between buying a sandwich, and a claimed 5-figure deal. No one is going to sue over not being able to buy a sandwich.

If you walk into a car dealership and buy a car, you can be damn sure there will be a sales contract.

So what's the difference?

And note this was not an advertisement, it was a personalized quote.

Also while advertisements made in separate channels (like on TV) might not be binding, at least where I live any advertisements made in the store are certainly binding.

The amount of money makes a big difference.

> it was a personalized quote.

"personalized quote" implies that the owner here took the time to look into the prospective buyer, and determine an amount that was based on that buyer.

It is not in any way, shape, or form reasonable to assume that the seller looked into Jump, determined that they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on something called "Wormhole Network", and that 50k was what they would reasonable pay for "wormhole.com".

Trying to phrase this as a "personalized" quote is misleading.

Supermarkets dont need to sell you stuff for the price on the shelf. That would be insane.

What?

Why would an email with a number not be a contract?

The same reason an mls listing is not a contract.

Huge difference, a mls listing is one sided so there’s clearly no meeting of the minds.

A written negotiation about the purchase price is completely different.

B: Hey, I’ll buy this from you for $2500

S: No, sorry. But I’ll take $50000

B: Deal!

Nope, the second step was not “I’ll take $50000”, it was “the price is $50000”. No different from an MLS listing.

He did not say, “if you pay $50,000, I will sell it to you.”

That only makes sense if you totally ignore the context. In context it was clearly a counteroffer.

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