Mt Gox may be long gone in the annals of bankruptcy, but its founder refuses to go gentle into that insolvent night. And, as CoinDesk reports, the disgraced former CEO of the one-time premier bitcoin trading platform has decided to give it a second try by launching new web hosting service called Forever.net and is registered under both Karpeles’ name and that of Tibanne, the parent company of Mt Gox.
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From the company profile [5]:
“TIBANNE Co.Ltd. is a Tokyo, Japan-based corporation founded in 2009 by talented technopreneurs. TIBANNE specializes in web hosting, IP transit, VoIP, software development and network administration. We are currently engaged in the reserch and development of new and existing services to produce innovative solutions for our clients.”
As CoinDesk notes, while Mark Karpeles has managed to keep a relatively low profile following the collapse of Mt Gox, he is willing to talk about other projects.
“Unlike other subjects, I am able to discuss Forever.net,” he told NewsBTC’s Eric Calouro [6].
In an email exchange with Calouro, Karpeles said Tibanne has been in the web hosting business for years. “We’ve been doing this since 2009, and even before founding Tibanne I help found a couple other hosting companies,” he said.
Going into details on his new company’s offerings, Karpeles said Forever.net will offer cluster-backed VPS servers with RAID1 on top of RAID 5 physical storage with hot spare drives on standby.
Here's to hoping that unlike his most famous previous venture the data stores on Karpeles' new servers won't just... disappear.
And speaking of bitcoin, so far there is no mention of this electronic currency anywhere on the site. This may change though:
Karpeles explained that Tibanne experienced a substantial loss of revenue due to the collapse of Mt Gox, coupled with an increase in legal costs. Now Tibanne is focusing on controlling expenses and generating revenue in an effort to “do its part in the Mt Gox bankruptcy process”, he said
“We are also considering accepting payments in BTC/LTC/etc.” said Karpeles. “Tibanne’s other hosting service KalyHost.com has been accepting BTC since Sept. 2010 and generated since then a total revenue of over 13,000 bitcoins.” Karpeles added that Tibanne will soon be releasing a new version of KalyHost.com as well.
The collapse of Mt Gox was caused by the alleged theft of about 850,000 BTC, although 200,000 BTC was recovered from an outdated wallet following the collapse.
Which also means that some 650,000 BTCs are still "out there" somewhere, despite bitcoin's much vaunted ability to track down and reverse any public theft. What it means about Karpeles ability to run a business in which every bit matters we leave up to readers.
As for Forever.net, somehow we feel that the irony of Karpeles' attempt to return to the spotlight starts with the name itself.
