TBR Musings - February 2, 2022 (3.Viewing)

Well its not that I don't trust them specifically, I just know that there are some I really don't trust. And you can happily trust a company right up to the point you find out they were cheating all along. A good cheater would simply let you win on occasion at less than your proxy bid just to convince you its on the level. You just never know what's really going on. And its not always the company, more likely the employees. When you have privileged information, some people can't resist the temptation.

Auction transparency will certainly have people on both sides of the fence. Transparency brings trust, but at a loss of privacy. Given the choice, I'd prefer the transparency.

Groot said:

$2550 for travelagent, wowzer

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Hopefully the TBR buyer already has an end user buyer.

silentg said:

Does the new WHC tbr system show who's bidding?

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No. Most don't, but there are some that do. Baremetal does. Unfortunately it doesn't matter much because its become a battle of the big two who are capturing 99+% of all TBR domains, and neither of them have any bidder transparency.

DomainRecap said:

Hopefully the TBR buyer already has an end user buyer.

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I'll give them $100 over their winning price. Easy way to make a quick $100 !

Let's hope (for the new owner) that travel picks up again after covid

rlm said:

I'll give them $100 over their winning price. Easy way to make a quick $100 !

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Is this domain not as niche as I think?
I thought digital bookings were making travel agencies (and their agents) obsolete.

They're still out there.

rlm said:

They're still out there.

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Plus the fact that you don't need to build a "brick and mortar" business with travelagent.ca to be successful. Great name for an online travel site. Worth the money IMO.

silentg said:

Does the new WHC tbr system show who's bidding?

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Not at this time, but it might be revisited in the future.

rlm said:

They're still out there.

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You don't need that domain there are so many variations you could go after

Travel Advisor

Travel Depot

Travel Hub

You can literally go on and on until you find one that is available and save yourself a few thousand bucks.

The dictionary is your oyster *YAHOO*

MapleDots said:

You don't need that domain there are so many variations you could go after

Travel Advisor

Travel Depot

Travel Hub

You can literally go on and on until you find one that is available and save yourself a few thousand bucks.

The dictionary is your oyster *YAHOO*

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That could be said of almost any domain...

aactive said:

That could be said of almost any domain...

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But multi-words are far more susceptible to it.

aactive said:

That could be said of almost any domain...

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Yes but it applies better to two word domains with a well known service attached.


Red Depot or Red Advisor does not sound as good as Travel Advisor or Travel Depot


The word Travel lends itself naturally to a second dictionary word.

This TBR session is over and done with.
Let's get one going for February 9th! *THUMBSUP*

FM said:

Not at this time, but it might be revisited in the future.

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This is a very dangerous road to go down, as I think it has very little to do with transparency and a lot to do with the ability to easily track bidders, prices paid, their patterns, sales, and other metrics.

This happened on eBay where they partially hid the IDs to stop user tracking and stalking, but competitors still managed to track their movements. For some reason, a section of society just loves to track people's purchases and then tries to use that data again them.

And if someone wants to cheat at auctions, they could just claim "full transparency" then create 100 fake IDs and use those an a random basis, or create a new set of IDs each week - without an audit how are you going to know?

If you want transparency, they only possible way to do it is to have a live auction. So why do people want trackable Bidder IDs if it proves absolutely nothing in terms of corporate ethics?

I'm hardly a big player in the TBR arena, but I value my privacy and I'm sure many others do too, especially as there is no possible way to stop potential shilling and other behavior with bidder IDs - scammers just keep creating new bidder IDs - that's been confirmed at some very big auction houses like Heritage and was only proven after the legal system got involved and went through their books to find employees, item sellers, companies and other insiders playing games.

Re: bidder IDs/bid history

DomainRecap said:

This is a very dangerous road to go down, as I think it has very little to do with transparency and a lot to do with the ability to easily track bidders, prices paid, their patterns, sales, and other metrics.

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If I were to implement it today, I'd be leaning more towards privacy and bidder IDs that are unique to each auction. I'm a privacy guy, but I also like transparency to some degree.

In other words, I share your concerns.

It's easy enough to limit and/or detect the creation of multiple bidder id's. I ran a domain parking company, and there are plenty of clues to the fact that multiple accounts are all linked to the same person. I would say you'd have to verify your identity the same way financial companies do, with a driver's license and/or passport, a verified cell phone number, as well as a single payment method (credit card), none of which can be linked to more than one account. You'd have to go to great lengths to fake all of that, and you certainly wouldn't be doing it frequently.

I also understand the desire for privacy, I feel like my moves are stalked as much as anyone else here. I think there are ways to run an auction that provide a reasonable balance of transparency _and_ privacy.

I like what the .ai registry does for their expired auctions. Each bidder, if they have never bid before, has to submit $100 deposit a few days before they can bid. The $100 sits in your account and can be used as credit on your first successful purchase. Making bidders put some money down, even if a small amount of money, quickly weeds out some of the scammers.

FYI link for those interested; auction is held once a month:

https://auction.whois.ai/auctions/

rlm said:

It's easy enough to limit and/or detect the creation of multiple bidder id's.

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You do realize the bidders I'm talking about were employees, insiders, partners, and others with more direct access than an end user.

And with the small number of bidders and low dollar amounts involved (compared to large auction houses like Heritage), this is all much ado about nothing.

And I will differ with you in terms of "level of stalking" between a business and an individual citizen, which is why the CIRA enforces privacy on the latter and not the former.

rlm said:

It's easy enough to limit and/or detect the creation of multiple bidder id's. I ran a domain parking company, and there are plenty of clues to the fact that multiple accounts are all linked to the same person.

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Not sure when you ran the company, but if I remember Google got pretty strict about parking companies ID'ing their customers to Google, which means there'd be something unique in the code pulling the ads, too.

rlm said:

I also understand the desire for privacy, I feel like my moves are stalked as much as anyone else here. I think there are ways to run an auction that provide a reasonable balance of transparency _and_ privacy.

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At the moment, I'd lean towards bidder IDs that are unique per auction.