The site was originally made for trading Magic The Gathering Online cards by one guy who later got bored and then got into Bitcoin but I have no idea and wikipedia doesn't mention if they reused any code or just the domain name itself.
It's a fun piece of trivia one crypto currency guy told me and it seems to be true.
Yes, I never realized.. seriously, I didn't until today. I thought it was meant to sounds like Knox and Mount to invoke images of gold, vault in a mountain side and so on.
It really bothers me how often people repeat it like it means anything in this case. Like they forget Amazon was just selling books. Also no idea if it still uses any of the old code or just the name itself.
Jed McCaleb built a beta release of a Magic trading card exchange for the MtGox domain. He then read about bitcoin in a Slashdot article posted on July 11th, 2010 after which he decided to write an exchange. McCaleb insists that the bitcoin exchange was completely different from the Magic cards exchange, but Mt Gox went live as a Bitcoin exchange July 18th, 2010.
So either McCaleb built a brand new exchange from the ground up in one week, or he reused code from his Magic card trading service.
McCaleb sold the site to Karpeles 8 months later, and 3 months after that, it was breached for the first time. Allegedly, the hacker used McCaleb's old admin credentials to arbitrarily assign himself any amount of bitcoin, which he then started selling off to crash the price. Since the price crashed to $0.01, the dollar value of the withdrawal limit represented several thousand bitcoin, which the attacker promptly sent off-site.
No matter if the site was reused code from a Magic card exchange, or was written from the ground up, it never should have been within a thousand miles of anything of value.
IIRC the site was written in PHP and it was a miracle it didn't get hacked earlier (or, now it seems, it did, but the hackers kept the site running to maximize the heist).
To be fair, PHP by itself is not the issue here, the issue is rather being amateurs (Mark, Ross) who started doing a fun project and ended up brokering millions of dollars without having the experience or opsec of doing so. This is what lead to their downfall.
It's a fun piece of trivia one crypto currency guy told me and it seems to be true.