There's Kanye West-Themed Crypto-Currency On the Way 237
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?"
Re:Good grief... (Score:5, Informative)
The US dollar does carry the signature of the Treasury secretary of the US government, and a big stick to whack you if you try to make one which looks the same.
Bitcoin is like Bansky, You don't even know who started it but it's got value because it's an original concept. Copycats can be made by anyone with even less consequences.
Re:Kanye can just screw off already (Score:5, Informative)
Kanye this. Kanye that.
Kanye who?
Greetings from a Radio 4 listener.
Re:Good grief... (Score:4, Informative)
There are hundreds of alt-coins. The vast majority of them bring nothing to the table at all. This is another one of those coins, not even worth discussing.
Of the hundreds of alt-coins only two are really worth even discussing, Namecoin and Litecoin. Litecoin being the second largest market cap and being ASIC hostile keeps more of the coin generation distributed and still has enough security to be usable. Namecoin is a good idea but basically is an unfinished work.
Re:Good grief... (Score:2, Informative)
Are you claiming that a bitcoin is impossible to copy? Perfect DRM? Or do you mean that a counterfeit would eventually be caught?
It seems to me that if 2 people came to my house and I bought something off them with the same bitcoin it would be duplicated and until they had a network connection to verify the coin there are 2 in existence, then whoever connected to the network second would discover his coin is worthless.