Bitcoin Forum

Mark Karpeles, CEO of the now-bankrupt Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, is auctioning off Bitcoins.com, a site Karpeles launched last year to provide information around the digital currency.

The domain will be sold July 24 by the U.S.-based auction house Heritage Auctions, with an opening bid set at $185,000. The sale is expected to fetch as much as $750,000.

Mt. Gox was once the largest online exchange for buying and selling bitcoins, but was forced to file for bankruptcy earlier this year after a massive hacking incident, incurring debts of more than $63 million.

Bitcoins.com has been owned and operated by Tibanne Co., Ltd., the parent company of Mt. Gox. It is different from the singular Bitcoin.com, which is owned by Blockchain, which makes a Bitcoin wallet app.

Proceeds from the sale of Bitcoins.com will partly be used to provide relief to Bitcoin holders who lost money in the collapse of Mt. Gox, Karpeles said in a statement shared with Coindesk, a Bitcoin news site, and confirmed via email to the IDG News Service.

The money will also be used to keep Tibanne running, Karpeles said, but at least half of the sale price will be paid to benefit Mt. Gox creditors.

“It is difficult for us at this time to provide a more accurate figure,” he said.

Despite Mt. Gox’s fall, interest in Bitcoin remains high among businesses and investors alike.

A number of other online exchanges like Coinbase and Circle have raised millions of dollars from prominent investors like Andreessen Horowitz, which could give them the cash to buy up Mt. Gox’s domain. That is, if they want to.

SOURCE : http://www.pcworld.com/article/2452060/mt-gox-ceo-selling-bitcoinscom-will-give-some-proceeds-to-burned-investors.html

Bitcoins.com auction page for those interested to bid
http://domains.ha.com/itm/bitcoinscom/a/1120-49.s

It sounds like a drop in the bucket at the absolute best. Regardless I don't think the domain would fetch that much at auction.

$750,000 won't happen, that's just insane, atleast we wait and see how much some one is willing to pay for it.

Three words, time will tell.

It's the least he could do

That's 5 words m8....

Anyway, yes i agree 750k is insane, but i learned one thing. People are ready to pay ridiculous amount of money for BTC related products / services.

"...Proceeds from the sale of Bitcoins.com will partly be used to provide relief to Bitcoin holders..." Thank you Mark!

I wonder if the domain will hit its minimum anyways $750,000 seems way over the top
Especially with the recent domain sale of satoshi.com not netting anywhere near that amount still worth watching though.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=675468.0

For those curious summary 1/10 of 750,000  8)

I agree with the sentiment stated so far in this thread. Although it's a nice sentiment, the domain name won't even come close to $750K. That particular name doesn't have any marketably unique draw to it in terms of a media location. And secondly, there are already multiple locations that serve as a hub in regards to bitcoin.

[As an example point of emphasis: if someone wants to look up bitcoins, he/she will more likely input the term into a search engine than type in bitcoin.com. So what would bitcoin.com offer that is worth $750K?]

Best case possible, he gets $750,000 for the domain and gives it all back to investors. That's still chump change compared to the cumulative loss of everyone that had btc stuck in mtgox when it went down. That's less than $1 per btc.

If they were, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=167776.0 would be sold by now.

which company is doing wat, how, where, why close them all down seize the assets and give the money back to the shareholders, and seize all the private assets in the process too

bitcoin.com is worth way over 1million usd, as is bitcoin.org. bitcoins.com probably 500-600k

If you knew anything about how the domain market works, you'd know that one word, generic, domain names are worth incredible amounts of money.

Yes, quite a few people use search engines for domain names etc. But Most people still simply type the domain name into the url bar.

Think about it this way, would you rather go on a search engine to visit a website, or simply type that websites name into the url bar? Exactly, you would do the latter(type the websites name into the url bar) because it's way easier than having to go on google everytime you want to visit the website. That's what makes one word, generic, domain domain names like bitcoin.com/bitcoins.com Extremely valuable.

its possibly a type of asset that could go into an investor fund for the creditors instead of being flogged off at the lowest price which is wat i can see happening here

They only save one click in browsers where the URL bar also queries a search engine for the domain keyword you just entered without an appendage.

That's only if a domain term is either tied to something that draws popularity in the mainstream or provide significant business incentive. I don't see the term bitcoin providing that. What would a central-term like bitcoin.com provide fundamentally in terms of business return? What would be the profitable traffic-draw of a site like bitcoin.com?

After all, comparatively, how often do people go to bitcoin.org for information on bitcoin?

I see bitcoin.com having more benefit in terms of the novelty usage rather than the traffic usage. And unfortunately, that doesn't translate to as much in terms of domain auctions.

Good guy Mark Karpeles!! Too bad even if it sells for 1 million it comes nowhere near the hundreds of millions people lost because of Karpeles' stupidity (or maliciousness).

I don't think an investment fund would have much use for a domain name as the domain would have little way to generate revenue.

Youch and well I guess it still is a value was pretty much expecting those who bought gox coins to not even get a dollar back on their purchase
Sucks for the investors.

Sure, whatever you say... ::)

Look, I'm a strong believer in bitcoin, but I'm fairly confident that the domain won't fetch that much. As much as I would like it to, particularly since the proceeds go to those who got burned (assuming he's being truthful), I just don't see it.

You keep saying to think of this as a company. Well, bitcoin isn't a company. Nor is it trademarked. Those would be fundamental factors in raising the price for non-novelty reasons. I've taken a good look at the aggregates that have made up the largest sales in terms of domain names recently, and to me, bitcoin doesn't fall into that particular trendline. I look at the type of names that comprise the list of largest sales and bitcoin.com seems to fall in the second quintile rather than the first quintile.

Regarding your point on traffic, since you so conveniently make that point, you should also naturally know that bitcoin.org just barely squeaks into the top 10,000 in Alexa ranking. It's strong, but not correlatively million-dollar strong. And the fact that it's the strongest bitcoin-related traffic speaks even volumes more.

It would be nice if bitcoin.com sold for a lot as it would show where bitcoin is at this moment in time, but at this point in time I don't see it.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2457840/sale-of-mt-goxrelated-bitcoinscom-halted-after-court-order.html