A few months ago, Heritage Auctions announced that it would be auctioning the Bitcoins.com domain name, which is owned by Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange parent company Tibanne. Shortly after the news, the Wall Street Journal reported that a “U.S. court order temporarily blocked the company that operated the exchange from selling assets,” and the auction didn’t happen. I visited the Bitcoins.com domain name today, and I saw a message that says the following:
“BITCOINS.COM is for sale
Please contact us if you would like to purchase BITCOINS.COM.This domain was created on Thu 30 Mar 2000 10:48:38 PM JST and can be bought from us.”
On the contact page, prospective buyers can fill out a form to inquire about the domain name. In addition, there is a mailing address for prospective buyers to send their inquiry via postal mail. Postal inquiries are directed to Tibanne Co.,Ltd. in Japan.
On the Bitcoins.com homepage, the company lists a variety of domain names for sale. Clicking on these domain names takes us to similar inquiry landing pages on each of these domain names, and it seems like there is a rotating list of domain names for sale on each refresh. There are a few valuable domain names up for sale that I found by clicking through to the various landing pages.
Here are a few of the more valuable domain names that appear to be for sale:
- EXB.com
- BQI.com
- AKB.com
- MH.net
- BitcoinDevelopers.com
- FN.net
- JPG.net
- MKG.net
- BCK.net
There also seem to be quite a few BTC and bitcoin-related ccTLD domain names listed for sale as well:
- BTC.li
- BTC.gl
- BTC.im
- BTC.lc
- BTC.tc
- Bitcoin.pw
- Bitcoins.tk
- Bitcoins.hn
- Bitcoins.ht
- BTC.st
It seems that the company built up quite a collection of domain names. The company also bought and owns the Gox.com domain name as well as the Ops.com domain name. Ops.com was reportedly acquired from domain investor Garry Chernoff in September of 2013. These two domain names do not look like they are listed for sale.
I don’t know if the company needs any type of approval to sell these domain names, but it seems like there are some good ones up for sale.
Who is behind Tibanne? Never heard of them…
Here’s more about the company: https://www.tibanne.com/about
Tibanne is owned by Mark Karpeles, the guy who ran the bitcoin exchange MtGox and “lost” 650,000 bitcoins. So far, not in jail.
domaintools says they own over 400 domains.
Whats to say another Bankruptcy sealed court order transfer away won’t happen again. To much risk.
As we saw recently with a clawback of 5000 domain names, if these are in BK, unless the BK court says they can be sold and I’d want that in writing, these can’t be sold.