> The MtG app was hosted on a subdomain (CNAME record, no A record) that sometimes had an accompanying apex-record lead-gen website to "sell" it, but usually didn't.
There's no links to, references about, or any other evidence to suggest that this happened. I too did roughly the same searches of Magic the Gathering forums and websites for any reference of mtgox and found absolutely nothing, not even people mentioning a beta site or that they'd heard about it.
> The app subdomain served a robots.txt that prevented the Internet Archive from indexing it--as is usual practice with app subdomains.
That's not possible. If you deny the IA bot with a robots.txt, it removes all prior records as well. The "coming soon" would not have been indexed and visible if this occurred.
> McCaleb doesn't generally want to talk about how his site used to host an MtG exchange, because that'd make people less willing to take BitCoin seriously. He doesn't deny it, though, nor use the misapprehension as a source of humor in interviews. He just clams up.
He hasn't denied being a flying spaghetti monster either.
Occam's razor. The site never sold Magic the Gathering cards.
A minor point- My understanding has always been that the intent of the original site was that it would provide a way to exchange virtual cards for the game Magic The Gathering Online, and not the (related) physical game.
That is, "Online" was part of the name of the game, not a descriptor of where the exchange was.
I don't know enough about MTGO to know if a third party exchange was even possible, but it would be worth looking into if someone was trying to establish if the site ever actually did anything.
The original source was MagicalTux in [edit <s>#mtgox</s> #bitcoin-otc], when he was asked "what does mtgox stand for?" The answer was that it stood for "Magic The Gathering Online eXchange", but he never said whether or not it was operational under that name.
People have never accused him to his face of being a flying spaghetti monster, though. I'm sure he's heard the wild speculations of how exactly his MtG exchange operated: on Reddit, years ago, there was an entire discussion about how the MtGox trading engine for bitcoins was crap precisely because it was originally built to trade in unique artifacts (MtG cards), not quantitative commodities. He must see a lot more of that than anyone who just happens to be reading about MtGox, to the point where you'd think he'd say something about it one way or another.
Also,
> That's not possible. If you deny the IA bot with a robots.txt, it removes all prior records as well. The "coming soon" would not have been indexed and visible if this occurred.
It would have removed the records of the app subdomain, not the apex domain. Which the evidence supports--we see no record left of an app subdomain.
There's no links to, references about, or any other evidence to suggest that this happened. I too did roughly the same searches of Magic the Gathering forums and websites for any reference of mtgox and found absolutely nothing, not even people mentioning a beta site or that they'd heard about it.
> The app subdomain served a robots.txt that prevented the Internet Archive from indexing it--as is usual practice with app subdomains.
That's not possible. If you deny the IA bot with a robots.txt, it removes all prior records as well. The "coming soon" would not have been indexed and visible if this occurred.
> McCaleb doesn't generally want to talk about how his site used to host an MtG exchange, because that'd make people less willing to take BitCoin seriously. He doesn't deny it, though, nor use the misapprehension as a source of humor in interviews. He just clams up.
He hasn't denied being a flying spaghetti monster either.
Occam's razor. The site never sold Magic the Gathering cards.