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There's Kanye West-Themed Crypto-Currency On the Way
Nerval's Lobster writes "A bunch of anonymous developers are working on 'Coinye West,' a crypto-currency named after rapper Kanye West. Coinye West isn't an official production of Kanye West, and the developers are staying anonymous because they probably fear the inevitable copyright lawsuits. (Of course, if the currency hits the online market and proves a success, it's always possible the real Kanye West would drop any suit in exchange for a massive amount of Coinye West coins—every hip-hop artist on the planet might claim to drive a Maybach, but how many can claim a currency?) 'DROPPING JANUARY 11, 2014. 11 PM EST,' read a note on Coinyewest.com. 'No premine, no screwed up fake "fair" launches, shyster devs, muted channels, and f**ked up wallets,' it helpfully added. 'We will be releasing password protected, encrypted archives containing binaries and source for the wallet and daemon BEFORE LAUNCH, with the passwords to be released at the specified time.' Just to emphasize the supposed fairness of this particular crypto-currency, the note repeated: 'We will work with multiple pools to orchestrate a PROPER and FAIR release.' A chat room is available at irc.freenode.net. Technical details for the crypto-currency include: Algorithm: Scrypt; max Coins: 133,333,333,333; block time: 90 seconds; difficulty Re-Target Time: 12 hours; block Rewards: 666,666 COYE; every 100k blocks, the payout halves. In the future, will every major celebrity will have a crypto-currency named after him or her? And how long until Jay-Z decides to launch something similar?"
I know it's now a cliche to pontificate "Why is this on Slashdot", but seriously? This is not news for anyone, certainly not "nerds", and clearly doesn't matter. It's not even funny. This "story" would be more appropriate next April.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Could have been Notorious B.I.G. Then we'd have had Mo Currencies Mo Problems.
Kanye this. Kanye that.
The bloodsucking money hungry leech just won't go away...
Bastard can't even sing.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Yo Bitcoin, I'm really happy for you, I'ma let you finish, but Kanye had one of the best Cryptocurrences of all time! One of the best cryptocurrencies of all time!
And how long until Jay-Z decides to launch something similar?
Who the fuck cares? I'll take 50 cents any day of the week.
If you don't use this currency, you're raaaaacist.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The cryptocurrency for smaller purchases?
This is yet another lame altcoin. It barely has a mention on bitcointalk. It's not really associated with someone famous. But it points the way to a potential success.
This could be a way to monetize fame. What if some major performer came out with an alt coin? They could anchor the coin value by making it exchangeable for concert tickets, downloaded tracks, and promotional merchandise. None of those things cost much to make, so they're not too vulnerable to price swings. The coin client can be combined with a music player/store client program, distributed with a few free tracks.
The problem with most of these alt coins is that you can't buy anything with them. If they were at least guaranteed to be tradeable for some music tracks and a T-shirt, there'd be some backing behind them.
gives a big toothy grin. Immutable, immortal, obstinate, rare, impervious to alchemy and gimmicks. Hated by the bankers, heavy to carry en masse, just simply good old fucking stupid gold.
When the power goes out gold is still there like the precious big turd it is. But I will take the turd over kanye-coins or bitcoins or shitcoins or other brave new world trinkets..
And no, the 'crash' in gold doesn't really matter. Smooth your purchases over time and forget about the yellow lump just like your don't think about the foundation that keeps your house upright.
Coinye West isn't an official production of Kanye West, and the developers are staying anonymous because they probably fear the inevitable copyright lawsuits.
You can not copyright a name. You can trademark a name and your trademark would only be valid for a particular use.
> the developers are staying anonymous because they probably fear the inevitable copyright lawsuits
So Kanye West wrote the code for the platform, and therefore owns the copyright to the code, and they pirated it? Why else would they fear a copyright lawsuit?
The GoatCoin.
You mean one with Gaping security holes?
Has anyone here been to Coinyewest.com? It features three Kanyes in blake KKK hoods. And Slashdot is giving these assholes free advertising?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I know most of us don't give a care that yet another alt-coin is launching (and with a primary feature of a sound-alike name to a rapper).
But to me, this is part of a much larger question. How long will it remain feasible to create new alt-coins, and what does this do to the existing alt-coin economy?
Not more than 6 months ago, I was fairly convinced that Litecoin had an interesting and very viable creation. (You know, the ever popular quotes of it being the "silver to Bitcoin's gold", and the fact it still used (scrypt) protocol so people could mine it with off the shelf, relatively affordable graphics cards?) Actually, it's still doing really well by most measures, with a current worth of something like $23-25 USD per Litecoin. But as more and more alt-coins pop up and scrypt mining trends towards people mining on sites that auto-switch among whichever coin is most profitable to mine at that given hour -- I start losing faith in the whole thing.
I mean, clearly anyone can launch an alt-coin just by essentially copy/pasting the code used to make an earlier one, give it some cute or catchy name, and its off and running. Common sense might tell you there's no point in wasting time trying to amass these silly creations, except with automation bundling laundry lists of altcoins under one roof, so to speak? I'm not sure miners will care WHAT their mining rigs are pointed at, as long as the system they use indicates it has the best combo of ease of mining and exchange rate at that moment in time. Eventually, it seems to me that behavior will just "normalize" all of the altcoin values so if you mine with scrypt, all scrypt generated currencies wind up being worth about the same thing. I guess a few that were clearly scams (developer was shown to have pre-mined a bunch before release with intentions to dump it all at once and walk away with a profit after it crashes) might get de-listed and rejected. But overall, it just seems to me like we're headed to a bad place with these coins -- where you've got Bitcoin out there standing alone as a high value cryptocoin (due largely to the huge financial investment needed to mine it successfully right now). The rest becomes a sea of mediocrity, all worth some piddly amount because as difficulty levels climb too high on one altcoin, people migrate to an easier to mine variant -- generally feeling like they're all "about the same thing anyway", being all scrypt-based and little more than coins you trade out for fiat currency or swap for Bitcoin as the long term plan.
And what of Mastercoin? Sounds to me like this is an attempt to obsolete the whole mess of altcoins by tying new ones onto the back of the existing Bitcoin blockchain? Is that an accurate assessment?
Nothing against Kanye West, but for when it matters, I'll take the gold standard of financial planning, Wu-Tang Financial, with a proven record of superior returns and risk mitigation.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
There *IS NOT* another "alt-coin" launching. This is a joke site that contains racist imagery, using Kanye West to bait gullible young people.
The site graphics open to a cartoon image of a "stereotypical" big lipped black man, presumably Mr. West. In the all black background, three sets of black-face eyes show up. The black background then drops to reveal three brack men in black KKK garb.
This is not the kind of crap Slashdot or Dice should be promoting.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Will this currency constantly over value itself?
Banks make loans in dollars. Banks are supported by the central bank in dollars. Banks are regulated in dollars and are given reserve ratios in dollars.
The problem with Bitcoin as a currency isn't that you don't pay taxes in it, but that there's no functioning debt and bond market in it. A medium of exchange from one good to another is necessary but exchange from now and the future is critical.
That's what really makes it a problem. It will never be a currency. Bitcoin is more like a commodity like Rembrandts, without the advantage of looking good, and with the advantage of being useful to evade laws against contraband.
For currency you need something that can work in an offline / not live / store and call in later setting. Also physical paying is needed as well. there are shops that like cash over CC's / some places are cash only.
...any form of fiat currency is as silly as the next. At least Kayne works for a living, art at that. What we all use now as money is setup and run by those that have the most money (imagine that) and are self-regulated. It's no different than Kayne sitting at his house with a special machine that he uses to print money, and handing it out to all of his friends to spend as they wish. This is exactly how the current monetary system works.
Once people see 'their time' as the 'real currency', they'll wonder why they're spending so much of it on money.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Is this good for his ego? I'm sure there's an inflation joke in there some where.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
How is he a public figure? He is boring on every account. There is just nothing there. How? Wha? He couldn't even make impregnating a Kardashian controversial or even interesting. Now if you tell me that Dennis Rodman wants to have money named after him, I could see why. Money would be more popular if you named it after youtube kittens than Kanye West... or furniture. Ikea coin. How about that? At least it wouldn't be useless.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
You can store BTC offline quite easily. Copy a (hopefully encrypted) wallet to a couple of thumbdrives.
Write failed: Broken pipe
He should call his crypto-currency "fishsticks". Then everyone will be asking why Kanye West likes fishsticks so much.
not talking about that offline talking about stuff where a place dials in at the end of day and or can work if say the network is down for a short time.
What about a bus where it may pick up people in a data dead zone and wait for it to get a data link back before sending out the payment info.
pay less per transaction but get burned big day to day volatility.
We will be releasing password protected, encrypted archives containing binaries and source for the wallet and daemon BEFORE LAUNCH, with the passwords to be released at the specified time.
A.K.A. "let's see how many fools we can get to run our trojan all at the same instant."
To do this correctly, they'd have to release source code and binaries before launch so that they can be examined and checked for security, then, at launch, simply release some necessary but harmless piece of data that is required to participate in the mining pool.
It'd be hilarious if this turned out to be a Bitcoin mining application which automatically forwards all coins harvested to a wallet somewhere.
1) Keep anonymous.
2) Set countdown.
3) Incentivised people (who may well have bitcoin on their machines) to run your secret software as quickly as possible when the countdown is over.
4) Profit.
I'm real happy for you and I'mma let you finish, but dogecoin is the BEST CURRENCY OF ALL TIME.
Not exactly. You just need a trusted middleman, like you do with a credit card.
They should have called it Coinye karCashian.
And names aren't copyrightable. Next time ask a lawyer.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
No, you can't. This ill-informed troll keeps cropping up, but it's just a total misconception about how it all works.
Bitcoin is a vast distributed transaction log. The only thing you store in that wallet is a private key. The coins are out there in the transaction log. The key just identifies the ones that you own. Only the holder of the private key can produce a transaction signed with that key, which is what is required to transfer the coins to another holder.
When you spend BTC, you create a transaction record and sign it with that key. That transaction then enters the Bitcoin network and peers verify whether it's correct or not. Whichever transaction gets consensus first wins - even if you created 100 transactions spending the same coin, only one of them will succeed.
Being dumb enough to believe that your transaction is good without this verification is equally as dumb as believing that an IOU from a random stranger you've never met before will be paid. Hence no-one actually does this - they only consider themselves paid when the network verifies that the BTC are owned by their wallet.
Bitcoin is not cash.
It requires you to be online to make transactions, can't make rapid transactions, isn't anonymous (or at least is much less anonymous) and isn't a physical object.
So without a network connection bitcoin is useless? Not trying to troll but I've ignored bitcoin as it seems like a ponzi scheme to make the first movers rich and doesn't work without a good internet connection. Since I live where there is barely an internet connection it seems useless for me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
You can store your shiney new Coinyewest coins in your new virtual KimKardashianKoinslot.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Want your own currency. Look no further:
http://coingen.io/
Can't really think of a more appropriate name.
Really ASCII? You can't do the symbol for cents?
FTFY
Or you could profit big on day to day volatility, by you know, selling high and buying low. Though you sound like the type that likes to buy high and sell low.
I was thinking the other day that if I were a technically-adept, enterprising dirtbag, I'd invent a crypto currency with hidden security defects that only I knew how to exploit (at least in the short term), let a bunch of it get created and then use the defects to swipe a ton of it and cash it in.
And if you live halfway up a mountain with no driveway, cars would seem useless to you also.
What does "barely an internet connection" mean anyway? You can only get the ones, not the zeroes.
And yes, Bitcoin requires an internet connection. Not necessarily a good one. Possibly not even a conventional one. But, indeed, some kind of connection to a global distributed transaction log is needed to actually use it.
The Kevin BaCoin?
What rises to become a currency, neglecting government mandates, is usually the most easily traded and accepted good, whatever that is, because that is the most useful in trade. Russia is full of smokers and drinkers, so everyone knows they can trade cigarettes and vodka pretty much anywhere to somebody. Bitcoin is very easily traded, assuming you have internet access, and acceptance is rising, though still small. It really should be considered a transferable commodity at this point, since it has not reached general acceptance, even within the online community. But in a few years it may have wide enough acceptance to be considered a full currency.
Fiat is a Latin word meaning "Let this be", as in the Biblical "Fiat Lux" - let there be light. It's a command. So a fiat currency is one commanded to be a currency by some authority. But if the currency is badly managed, people will no longer accept it and look for something else. I'm old enough to remember the high inflation in the US around 1980, when everyone was looking for an "inflation hedge", i.e. something that didn't lose value at 1% a month.
The older cryptocurrencies are open-source, so you just download the source code from the repository, make a few changes (like the mining algorithm and reward schedule) and send it off. Litecoin is literally made that way, they just tweaked a few parameters and substituted a different hashing function.
I'm mining Protoshares, because it actually brings something new, and not just tweaking the source code. A stream of business concepts will be forked off the prototype shares, with each one having shares issued in proportion to the holdings of protoshares. Think of it like a venture capital fund, except the capital is created by mining, rather than gathering piles of dollars from investors. Once issued, the forked shares will trade on their own chain. Their value will depend on the strength of the business ideas and execution, thus directing investment value when the various shares are sold for fiat currencies.
> How long will it remain feasible to create new alt-coins, and what does this do to the existing alt-coin economy?
Nothing prevents me from creating an auction website either. But eBay will still be the dominant site because of the network effect.
Bitcoin has brand recognition, a whole ecosystem of software, apps, custom hardware, 35,000 merchants, 1.6 million online wallets + plus some number of PC wallets. A new altcoin can't reproduce that, it only has the default mining program that bitcoin started with 5 years ago. Because of the network effect, the most utility resides in the network with the most users.
The landscape is heavily tilted to the biggest digital currencies, and will remain that way.
Makes sense, we already have one based on Missy Elliot.
I actually have lived places (though only a third of the way up the mountain) without a driveway and my transportation was by foot to the highway where there was a greyhound to flag down, hitch hiking or bicycling.
Crappy internet connection is a 26.4 KB connection and half the sites time out half the time.
I'm just trying to find out if bitcoins work when the net is down or not. I've always suspected that they don't work so good without an internet connection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
No. The principle of Bitcoin is about eliminating the need to trust. It does this by creating thousands of witnesses to your transaction. It's slightly problematic but it's not a fault of Bitcoin, it's just the nature of the beast.