Now the sellers of year2000.com - Canadian computer consultant Peter de Jager and Houston-based Internet marketing company Tenagra Corp. - are waiting to see if the offer is a bona fide bid or an online put-on.The hefty price tag for year2000.com, which garnered a total of 13 bids on Internet auctioneer eBay Inc., would blow past the more than $7.5 million dished out for business.com in November.

At that time, high-powered Internet venture capital firme Companies paid roughly $7.5 million, which was heralded as the most ever paid for a Web domain name, to Houston-based media entrepreneur Marc Ostrofsky.

"We were hoping to beat the record, but we didn'T think it was probable," Tenagra chief executive Cliff Kurtzman told Reuters. "We were very, very pleased."

De Jager and Tenagra say the identity of the bidder who promises to be willing to pony up $10 million for year2000.com will be disclosed only after the deal is completed.

Although eBay notes on its site that a winning bidder will enter into a legally binding contract to buy the item from the seller, Kurtzman said he is not spending the money just yet.

"There have been many incidents of pranks," said Kurtzman, who is the midst of contacting the winning party. "But we are optimists. We received two bids at $10 million, and we think there is a fair chance that one or the other is real."

But de Jager himself, a well-known year 2000 evangelist who has spent about six years travelling the world warning about the potential for disaster from the millennium bug, confesses to being "a card-carrying sceptic."

"I don'T even believe it's real. I have too many people hating me, who want to see me with egg on my face," said de Jager, who has received hate mail in response to his warnings of a potential year 2000 disaster.

"We will know within seven days if it's real. But I'm a sceptic and that applies to everything I did in relation to Y2K."

De Jager and Tenagra created year2000.com in 1995 to forge awareness about the chance computers could trip over the two zeros in 2000. But as the New Year approached and departed with much revelry and little upset, their need for the domain name waned.

"Year2000.com has served its purpose well and in the last year of the millennium it can be put to better use," de Jager said in a statement. "I hope we can find it a good home."

During the bidding process, which began Dec. 22 and ended Jan.1, de Jager and Tenagra offered a $10,000 reward to the first person who suggested someone who ended up buying the name. They say the identity of that person will also be revealed once the deal is completed.

On their Web site, de Jager and Tenagra offered a list of reasons a person or company might be willing to buy a domain name that some would argue only has a one-year life-span. The two explain the name year2000.com comes with about 25,000 links pointing to it, providing the buyer with instant traffic.Or, they say: "Someone like M&M'S Might get some advertising mileage out of it (MM are the roman numerals for 2000)."

If that is not satisfactory: "There might be those that would find it of value to have year2000.com because it is the first year of the 2000's and it will be the 2000's for another 1000 years."

Kurtzman said a minimum bid requirement of $1 million for year2000.com was based on past offers that had been turned down because the site's mission was incomplete.

He said if the $10 million offer is legitimate, $1 million will go to charity and the remainder will be split between de Jager and Tenagra.The team will continue to report on the after-effects of the year 2000 bug from the less time-sensitive pdejager.com and will eventually turn their focus to electronic commerce issues.

EBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove said a small percentage of bids on the company's site turn out to be pranks. He said, however, if the $10 million offer for year2000.com is legitimate, the address could possibly rank as one of the most expensive items ever sold on the site.