That Gox used to be something else means nothing. What matters is what it is - and that is not a trading card site. Millions of domains were something else. Many of us have pivoted from one idea to the next while salvaging what we can or what we learned.
I also don't think being in over your head or having architectural issues is a crime - it's the default state for startups, especially ones trying to keep up with big growth.
Putting shit on mtgox for being the quintessential bootstrapped startup, on HN, is just stupid.
I also don't think being in over your head or having architectural issues is a crime - it's the default state for startups, especially ones trying to keep up with big growth.
While this statement is usually true, let's not generalize. There are some kinds of business or services where you are doing a disservice to the world by being in over your head.
Example: If you decide to "disrupt" home construction and sidestep the various annoying and taxing construction regulations. You simply must not go around selling houses to people unless you are actually very, very confident that you are not building a dangerous product.
Same thing for making food that people eat, pacemakers, radiation devices, and taking people's money to safeguard. It's not a crime to make mistakes that nobody with reasonable experience could foresee, but it is absolutely wrong to make avoidable mistakes that hurt your customers due to industry inexperience.
This is weirdly incorrect for a number of reasons.
Firstly it's not simply a domain change. There's very good reason to believe that the architectural problems MTGox are facing today may be due in part to re-using not fit-for-purpose code, from the earlier revision of their product. Yes it never went live, and yes it's new people now; both of those things are irrelevant unless there was a complete code re-write at some point.
On to your next point, there certainly is a problem with being in over your head if you're dealing with financial trading. Some industries are not suited to amateur attempts, period. Think of the amount of litigation MTGox are opening themselves up to, not just in terms of people who use them, but based on the wider impact to the BTC community if they really stuff things up. Not good if they can't show due dilligence beyond "LOL we're a startup, what do you expect?".
If they're still using the source code from 2010 when it was a completely different business with a completely different name with a completely different purpose owned by a completely different person, according to the Wikipedia link you posted.
You're pretending this was just a domain name sale; that's not what the public story is, the story is that it was re-purposed by the original owner who then sold it to the current owners so there's every reason to believe it's based on the original code.
In this fantasy is the surviving code supposed to be mission critical stuff that magically applied to the completely different second business and survived the years and growth since 2011?
Well, I have a hobby project for trading X, then I decide I want to have a project for trading Y; isn't this an obvious instinct to modify the one I'm already working on to fit a new purpose, instead of starting for scratch? If the author didn't know much about complexities of money trade, I'm pretty sure he did just that.
I've seen people retrofitting their CMSes to do everything. Hell, I even did this myself with my hobby game engine. It's common for programmers.
Thank you for some common fucking sense; that's exactly what programmers do and exactly what would have happened. Gox most certainly has code originally built for a card game.
Numerous people have posted information with sources that directly conflicts with most of your opinions, while you ride on this apparent "4+ years ago some dude maybe reused some source" for whatever that's even supposed to mean.
MtGox has more traffic than HN, survived immense press and growth over the last couple years as bitcoin rose into mainstream popularity, and did so as a market leader for most of that time. That alone should tell you very little if any source remains, it's not like that dude's beta that apparently never even launched was likely to just scale through several orders of magnitude more traffic and solve every problem and new or different need along the way.
Fantasy sounds like exactly the right term. Unless you have any proof. Do you?
I also don't think being in over your head or having architectural issues is a crime - it's the default state for startups, especially ones trying to keep up with big growth.
Putting shit on mtgox for being the quintessential bootstrapped startup, on HN, is just stupid.