Mike Robertson of Domain Guardians was quoted in an article out today on Bloomberg. The article written by Olga Kharif looks at the demand for Bitcoin related domains while the value of Bitcoins have actually declined substantially from their highs. The article quotes a number of sources involved with both crypto currencies and domain names, well worth the read.
From the article:
Bitcoin’s 46 percent decline in the value since its December peak hasn’t damped a surge in prices for Internet domain names related to the virtual currency.
Entrepreneur Niko Younts said he sold the BitcoinWallet.com name in January for $250,000 — 23 times what he paid a month earlier. Investors buying bitcoin-related Web addresses in hopes of a fast resale are fueling a domain-name boom. Some 3,290 names ending with .com or .net and containing “bitcoin” have been registered since May 12, according to Verisign, which operates a registry for those top-level domains.
Prices for addresses referencing digital currencies such as bitcoin have tripled since last year, Rob Lagsam, sales director at domain-name seller BinaryCoin.com, said in an e-mail. While some sold for $5 a few years ago, brokerage Domain Guardians Pty Ltd. is now trying to sell BTC.com, based on an abbreviation for bitcoin, for more than $1 million.
“Premium, generic, category-defining domains are like prime real estate,” Mike Robertson, co-founder of Brisbane, Australia-based Domain Guardians, said in an interview. “Owning a name like BTC.com would be like owning a shop front” on New York’s Fifth Avenue, London’s Oxford Street or the Los Angeles area’s Rodeo Drive.
Read the full article here
I gave most of my “Bitcoin” domains away to a friend, with no regrets. I believe I still own smartbitcoin.org and freebitcoins which if BTC survives as a currency, I may develop into a way to fund charitable ventures. A uniform digital currency will gain critical mass. The question is which one, or which ones. The Mt. Gox fiasco created fear and uncertainty. But BTC managed to recover. I’d wager BTC.com will fetch a pretty high price.