Coinye is back! (Kind of, with different owners, but shhh don't tell anyone)

When we broke the story about the Kanye West inspired cryptocurrency Coinyecoin, we had several questions. Why wasn’t the mining process called gold digging, would Kanye give a shit, and could the coin be a worthy Bitcoin competitor?

In the end it turned out that yes, Kanye did give a shit and he sent in his lawsuits in an attempt to obliterate the coin from the earth. Quickly, in a legal side-step, the developing team changed their logo from an image of Kanye West to an image of a gay-fish imitating Kanye West, and rush-released the coin.

Within moments of it being released, all hell broke loose. Several posters on several forums in several different threads were all complaining about a lack of support, coins being “mysteriously” lost, and downtime. People felt cheated and some called it a scam.

The site and coin were both shut down, with the head-developer reportedly stepping down. If you visit coinyewest.com right now, all that remains is a really unfunny and severely dated meme. I got in touch with the original – still anonymous – people that started up Coinyecoin to find out why. They told me I could send some more questions over email, so I did, but they didn’t reply. A few days later, I received an email from them that simply read: “selling the documents the lawyers send me! HOT HOT HOT HOT”.

It seemed super shady and I replied with, "LOL, are you going to answer my questions"? Eventually, last night, they did. What follows is my email correspondence with, if they are as they claim, the new developers behind Coinyecoin. They could just be the same guys from before, I guess. Either way, they were a lot more prickly than our last chat.

Noisey: Hey guys, so what happened?

CoinYe: Due to the lawsuit some of the old developers, the original people who created the currency, have sold all their coins. This resulted in a major breakdown of the Coinyecoin cryptocurrency stability. However, though the old developers made quick Bitcoin by dumping the coin, we, the new development team, have had to work hard to gain trust among miners. We managed to get the logins to the accounts of the original 'Coinye West', after the owner gave them to someone incompetent online. You can find us at irc.freenode.net and #coinyecoin. We have done give aways, arranged a new exchange website, are are currently busy translating the wallet for different languages (for instance: Mandarin & Cantonese).

What have Kanye's legal team said to you?

We have not had any direct contact with Kanye's legal team. They have sent the documents for sueing the original "Coinye West".

Why do you reckon his legal team are against the currency?

We don't know. It might be something to do with what the original developer said before the coin got launched, and vague names about the coin. But we consider it as Coinyecoin without any relation to Kanye West.

Are you scared of his lawyers?

Would you be scared? I am not scared, we do not operate in the USA nor are there any strong laws against satire.

How many coins were mined during the time that it was live?

It is still live and the amount of coins that have been mined are around 9,486,990,514. You can see the actual amount here.

What would happen to the coins that were mined if the currency was to shut down?

They are still in circulation, if you want to stop it you should make mining for coinyecoin illegal. But this is impossible to do.

Why did the original developer choose to shut-down the coin?

The coinyecoin community can decide if it will die or not and not one man. Especially not a group of lawyers that misinterpret the purpose of this coin.

I heard that Amazon and other outlets have rejected the coins?

I think you misheard it, the coins have never been accepted and thus never been adopted. This can change in the future, as we want to be a coin for the masses. It still can grow, it's currently got a small user base compared to the Bitcoin community. This also means the value of Bitcoin is much higher than coinyecoin.

What happened in the first few days of the launch? I read about some major problems.

We don't know, the old developers might know about it.

What do you have to say to the people who said it was a scam?

We don't know if it was a scam or not, as we are not the same people. The community weakened the day after the old developers left. The community became weary it was a scam because the currency could be 'pre-mined' (when people mine before the release date). The original developers where vague on this aspect, they said they were not going to pre-mine, but later they went back on their word. People immediately began to believe that the coin's purpose was for 'dumping' and not for a stabilized cryptocurrency coin.

Why not change the name to something like Drizzy's dollar? Or take away any notion of celebrity? Surely that would have saved the legal trouble in the first place?

Why should we change the coin name, we like the logo and the name of the coin. There is also a Kardashian Coin or something, everybody can make a coin. It's just a code. We could rebrand it and call it VICE Coin and people with Coinyecoin wallet could still trade with it. Even people that are new on the front of coins, it takes just time.

What are you going to do next?

We are busy translating the wallets, busy with exchange websites, promotional work in China, a lot of things. It is a viable currency with a good, popular base and deserves to become a top tier currency like Litecoin and Bitcoin.

Follow Ryan on Twitter: @RyanBassil

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