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Comment by kyro | Hacker News Reader

The possibility of them being acquired is discussed quite a bit, but of what value is Gox to a potential acquirer at this point, considering they've indeed hemorrhaged money? What remaining assets or loyal customer base would make it worth millions of new capital?

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If indeed they lost 770k BTC then, in my view, there can only be two reasons someone would buy them:

1. A buyer truly believes that Gox death would mean Bitcoin death or stagnation for 5-10 years and, thus, his own coins would be worthless anyway.

2. A buyer believes he can make more than 770k BTC he'd have to pay back customers.

However, I don't really think they've lost that much. It is simply insane. I don't believe anyone can be that incompetent, especially after reading Mark's 2012 message about security here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=23938.msg1177353#msg...

Update. Rumor on twitter about the acquisition: https://twitter.com/paulbuitink/status/438428157948219392

it's a little like the story of the gold reserves of the federal reserve isn't it ? :D

3. The buyers are only interested in acquiring the domain/brand, not the company's obligations and debt. They would get sold off in bankruptcy anyway.

And what would be the point of that? No one would ever trust anything to Gox, unless it returns the money.

Thousands of links, including mentions in every major news publication. They aren't going to disappear or be retroactively rewritten.

Nor would the previous owner's past be reason for someone not to trust the current owner of the brand. You wouldn't stop trusting Bitstamp or BTC-e if they happened to buy the MtGox domain. Nor would someone reading an old NY Times article stop to research the past owner's history.

The grand vision of Coinbase isn't to capture as much of the Bitcoin speculation market as possible, it's to capture as much of the e-commerce payment market as possible by offering lower transaction fees and eliminating chargeback risk for merchants. If, for example, they took over the MtGox domain, and that helped stabilize Bitcoin and continue its push towards the mainstream, then "snitko's and 0.02% of our target market's image of us is tained by Gox's past" is probably a good tradeoff.

I think no one would be willing to buy MtGox knowing they wouldn't be paying the debt. Imagine MtGox customers going to mtgox.com, then being redirected to Coinbase: it's like saying "Hi, we bought MtGox. We know you've lost your money there, not gonna return it. Come do business with us instead!". That's nuts and is going to hurt buyer's image a lot.

Then shouldn't Enron and Lehman Brothers be highly valuable brands?

The different business units in various countries for those organisations were sold off.

It is indeed absurd to claim they lost 99.7% of btc holdings (2000 left out of 750k) - I dont care how incompetent they may be..

They could know exactly where they are but not have the private key.

Even if Gox didn't lose the money, or at least not as much as we're hearing, who's going to 'bank' with them now? Who would leave their money with someone who will, at any time, cut off access and actively refuse to provide information?

Their value has been totally demolished in the eyes of their current customers and in the eyes of all potential customers. It's so bad that it has set back Bitcoin's adoption by months, if not years. The freaking Wall Street Journal published articles about it!

If this is not a case of fraud, then it is one of the worst and most poorly managed acquisitions in history.

They claim to have 1.1 customers, 550,000 which have submitted extensive identification documents for verification.

The large number of AML/KYC verified accounts could be valuable to other exchanges.

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