Rapper Kanye West has a love-hate relationship with the internet and he has already been the subject of quite a few memes, some of which were so popular that they were satirized by South Park on more than one occasion.
As if Dogecoin was not enough, the flamboyant artist is about to get a digital currency named after him. Coinye West is the name of the new coin and it should go live in eight days.
Though we can’t fault the design and Coinye is certainly getting plenty of coverage, we are not sure Kanye or his lawyers will be flattered (if South Park is to be believed Kanye hasn’t always taken jokes well). Especially as it doesn’t appear that the Coinye West team got permission to use his image. (In an interview with Noisey, the developers said they “want to stay sorta anonymous in case kanye gets pissed off.”)
The Coinye West team reached out to Kanye on Twitter, but so far they have not received a reply.
@kanyewest Kanye, have you ever invested in bitcoin or litecoin? What do you think of @CoinyeWest ?
— Coinye West (@CoinyeWest) December 31, 2013
Coinye West is supposed to launch on 11th January and the team behind it hopes to make it as simple as possible, so it appeals to as wide an audience as possible. The developers are still working on mining software dubbed ‘CoinyeMiner’, although we would have gone with ‘Gold Digger’. The currency is Scrypt-based and the developers say their goal is to make mining a one-click proposition, allowing every user to mine their coins.
The developers told Noisey they could imagine a future “where Coinye is used to buy concert tickets” and said they’d give Kanye West 100,000 Coinye at the launch if he got in touch with them. They have also reportedly said that some online merchants have been in touch to find out how they can accept Coinye payments.
So while we eagerly await the world’s latest altcoin, it would perhaps be wise to mentally prepare ourselves for the possibility that we could all soon be using a Kanye West-branded currency.