Coinye: The Kanye West cryptocurrency that never was
Coinye is very much like the Dogecoin that has been making all the news lately, a funny cryptocurrency project made as a joke. The musician Kanye West, however, sued it into oblivion.
In my upcoming book, I write about alternative cryptocurrencies that anyone can create, like the Dogecoin that has been making the news lately: “Some altcoins appeared to be little more than jokes, like the one called Coinye West, after the controversial hip-hop artist … [By 2014], Coinye had already been sued practically to death by a Kanye who did not appreciate the humor.”
West’s divorce proceedings with the celebrity Kim Kardashian, revealed on Friday, had made me think a lot about the man. West is a man very much of the times. Not only did he make the news because of the divorce, he also ran for U.S. president — and he also has a connection to the whole Bitcoin thing that has been so much in the news lately. And that is not all. Those aspects of West’s life — his cryptocurrency connection and his presidential run — also point to a link to the whole #FreeBritney movement, centered around the new documentary on the singer named Spears.
There once was an episode of the animated comedy South Park in which a joke that flew over Kanye West’s head results in his being called a “gay fish,” which infuriates him even more due to his still not getting the humour. West ends up killing the comedian he deemed responsible. Years later, life would imitate art.
Coinye is very much like the Dogecoin that has recently gotten the support of the entrepreneur Elon Musk, a funny cryptocurrency project made as a joke. West, however, did not find Coinye funny at all and thus killed it.
I do not think, though, that West is a douchebag who would do something like that. I view his move to sue Coinye in the same vein as his presidential campaign. The Washington Post had reported that West’s campaign had been bolstered by Republican operatives, which “raises the specter that his candidacy is being propped up by a GOP-driven [Republican] effort to siphon votes from presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.”
This is a man severely mentally ill, yet flush with cash, surrounded by people who either will not say no to him or are trying to take advantage of him. Kardashian’s divorce from West will surely make things worse.
In that sense, West is little different from Britney Spears, the singer whose life had been recently laid out in a much-talked about documentary — thrust into serious situations for which they were not ready, counseled by people who may not have their best interests at heart. The documentary had caused fans to rally to back the singer’s bid to gain legal control of her affairs, to #FreeBritney.
Now, the thing about cryptocurrencies is that they cannot be killed. There is no Bitcoin chief executive, no central administrator for Doge. West may have sued the creators of Coinye, forcing them to step away, but the blockchain, the underlying network for the coin, still exists — in theory, at least. Dogecoin, after all, has been running without its creators for years, with the network having had no upgrades since the time of Barack Obama.
If people have the will, there is definitely a way to still trade Coinye. Like for Spears, there should be a movement to #FreeKanye, and to start that, we need to free #Coinye.