Mt. Gox. The ridiculous name had an even more ridiculous origin. Its owner, Mark Karpeles, a twenty-eight-year-old French émigré to Shibuya, Tokyo, who called himself the King of Bitcoin and who had spent much of his twenties posting cat videos to YouTube, had purchased the company from an entrepreneur who had originally built the website as a trading hub for cards from the game Magic: The Gathering. Hence the name Mt. Gox, an acronym that stood for “Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange.”
