Last night, I reported about the sale of the Gox.com domain name to Mt. Gox parent company, Tibanne Co. Ltd. The domain name was sold by domain investor Andy Booth, who confirmed the sale of Gox.com and provided some additional insight about it.
Joe Politzer of DN.BIZ, the domain name broker who negotiated the deal on behalf of Booth, shared some additional details about the sale. Below is the account from Politzer, which I think is interesting. Although the sale price is not being revealed by the seller or domain broker, I think you’ll appreciate his recap:
“The short story of the deal starts back in mid December when Andy’s brother James of Booth.com added us as a broker for some of their names at DomainNameSales. Whenever someone adds us I always check their domains to see if there may be any potential opportunities there and I saw one of their portfolio’s was named “LLL” which is generally a positive thing if you are a broker. Unfortunately with DNS I couldn’t seem to find a way to actually contact the client to discuss their domains with them so I reached out to Jeff Gabriel to get me in touch with the client.
From there James sent me his lists and he and his brother have some very good domains so I got to work on them. It was only random that James happened to be in Singapore which I frequently visit since I am staying in Bali at the moment.
I reached out to Mt Gox and the deal took a few weeks to come together but we made a deal for the domain that included both a fair amount of cash and some bitcoins. Mark was a very nice guy and very patient in my opinion especially considering all that seems to be going on in his world from what we see in the media. I never really asked him about all of that; I just stayed focused on the deal as that was really the point.
It was definitely interesting as our deal was going down the same time as all this news about him and his company is going down. The deal started Escrow at the beginning of a weekend and international wires are often not instant. Furthermore since Escrow.com does not support bitcoins yet we had decided that the bitcoin component of the deal would be transferred after the Escrow was closed. Nonetheless I never questioned him and took him for his word and he is a man of his word. The domain transferred, Escrow Closed, bitcoins delivered, done deal!”
As of this moment it appears Mt. GOX is insolvent and people are going to lose their money and their bitcoins unless there is a hail mary so once people hear he just recently paid for something in cash and bitcoins expect the floodgates to open.
This domain is huge, it resurrected the forming of a new company, and may have caused the immediate folding of the old company. Rebranding under way, not sure who they are fooling. Basically changing the name, does not help the fact people are losing money?
Agree with Anticareer’s sentiment. 744,000 bitcoins are unaccounted for and thousands of people have lost their investments and this guy upgrades his site’s domain name with cash and bitcoins? Fishier by the minute.
Since now there is no official statement from Mtgox of bankruptcy. If they can payout their customers, a “new” Gox.com could become the biggest btx (altcoin) exchange. But they have to overthink their communication policy.
Only way old account holders can be paid back is formation of new company, with new deposits, get it?
Ponzi scheme