Hacker News Reader

> The MtG app was hosted on a subdomain (CNAME record, no A record) that sometimes had an accompanying apex-record lead-gen website to "sell" it, but usually didn't.

There's no links to, references about, or any other evidence to suggest that this happened. I too did roughly the same searches of Magic the Gathering forums and websites for any reference of mtgox and found absolutely nothing, not even people mentioning a beta site or that they'd heard about it.

> The app subdomain served a robots.txt that prevented the Internet Archive from indexing it--as is usual practice with app subdomains.

That's not possible. If you deny the IA bot with a robots.txt, it removes all prior records as well. The "coming soon" would not have been indexed and visible if this occurred.

> McCaleb doesn't generally want to talk about how his site used to host an MtG exchange, because that'd make people less willing to take BitCoin seriously. He doesn't deny it, though, nor use the misapprehension as a source of humor in interviews. He just clams up.

He hasn't denied being a flying spaghetti monster either.

Occam's razor. The site never sold Magic the Gathering cards.

A minor point- My understanding has always been that the intent of the original site was that it would provide a way to exchange virtual cards for the game Magic The Gathering Online, and not the (related) physical game.

That is, "Online" was part of the name of the game, not a descriptor of where the exchange was.

I don't know enough about MTGO to know if a third party exchange was even possible, but it would be worth looking into if someone was trying to establish if the site ever actually did anything.

The original source was MagicalTux in [edit <s>#mtgox</s> #bitcoin-otc], when he was asked "what does mtgox stand for?" The answer was that it stood for "Magic The Gathering Online eXchange", but he never said whether or not it was operational under that name.

[edit] Here's the IRC log of the original source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7015.0

People have never accused him to his face of being a flying spaghetti monster, though. I'm sure he's heard the wild speculations of how exactly his MtG exchange operated: on Reddit, years ago, there was an entire discussion about how the MtGox trading engine for bitcoins was crap precisely because it was originally built to trade in unique artifacts (MtG cards), not quantitative commodities. He must see a lot more of that than anyone who just happens to be reading about MtGox, to the point where you'd think he'd say something about it one way or another.

Also,

> That's not possible. If you deny the IA bot with a robots.txt, it removes all prior records as well. The "coming soon" would not have been indexed and visible if this occurred.

It would have removed the records of the app subdomain, not the apex domain. Which the evidence supports--we see no record left of an app subdomain.

> People have never accused him to his face of being a flying spaghetti monster, though.

Simply not denying some claim is not evidence that the claim is true, regardless of whether the claim has been presented to you face to face.

> Simply not denying some claim is not evidence that the claim is true, regardless of whether the claim has been presented to you face to face.

No, in general it is evidence to that effect, though depending on the circumstances it may be weak or very weak evidence.

> (My own hypothesis would support McCaleb never responding to gwern's query.)

He has, incidentally. (Unfortunately I think he misunderstood the question and I'm still waiting on a reply to my clarification, so I haven't edited the page again.)

He's replied again: it seems Mtgox did sell cards at some point. I've asked him about the details, but that would seem to be that.

because that'd make people less willing to take BitCoin seriously

Speaking as someone who's heavily involved in (as a hobby) running professional and semiprofessional Magic events, I'd like to point out that professional Magic players seem, on average, much more likely to end up working in finance and doing quite well there.

So maybe the implied sneers at the game's lack of seriousness or lack of financial seriousness (that's way off as well, for the record) are... more telling of the average Bitcoin aficionado's mis-grasp of economics and reality than anything else.

Except: it's more common that such sneers come from Bitcoin-mockers than Bitcoin-aficionados.

(You were making such a nice point about superficial, unfair generalizations of Magic players... which was then undone by a superficial, unfair generalization about Bitcoin-aficionados.)

Wait no longer! At the bottom of the linked post:

More importantly, McCaleb replied to my email. In response to my question "Did anyone ever actually trade card for card or money for card on Mtgox.com?", he replied "yeah they did".