A planned auction of bitcoins.com, a domain name owned by the chief executive of Mt. Gox, has been postponed after a U.S. court order temporarily blocked the company that operated the exchange from selling assets, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. A district court in Washington state issued the injunction, which will expire in 14 days, against web-hosting company Tibanne in response to a request from Seattle-based CoinLab, which has filed a suit in the U.S. against Mt. Gox. The international legal dispute that has erupted over the remnants of Mt. Gox reflects the escalating tug of war among interested parties over how the Japanese company's assets — much of which are denominated in a virtual currency — should be divided up. Mt. Gox collapsed in February, claiming it had lost 850,000 bitcoins due to hacking attacks. Most of the assets, worth $500 million, belong to creditors, and the exchange is in Japanese liquidation proceedings under the supervision of a court-appointed trustee.
