Kanye West-Inspired Bitcoin Alternative Coinye West to Launch Next Week

With a tag line of "We ain't minin', we pickin'" Coinye West will be the latest virtual currency to launch when it goes public on 11 January.

With Dogecoin - a crypto-currency based on a meme about a dog - we thought we had seen the craziest virtual currency of all, but just a month after that launched, along comes Coinye West, a crypto-currency based on a mixture of bitcoin and rapper Kanye West.

It has no link to the rapper himself, and is following in the footsteps of bitcoin, but Coinye West is joining an ever increasing bandwagon of crypto-currencies, the catch-all title for digital currencies which are 'mined' by your PC by solving increasingly complex mathematical equations.

Bitcoin is the granddaddy of all crypto-currencies having been created in 2008, and it is upon the shoulders of bitcoin that Coinye West is being created, using the publically available bitcoin open source, likely altered to give the public-facing aspects of Coinye West a bit more bling.

The creators told Noisey: "We're really not sure how Kanye is gonna react to this. We hope he loves it, but if he doesn't, he really isn't someone we want to piss off."

The goal of the creators of Coinye West seems to be to bring crypto-currencies to the masses:

"Our goal with Coinye West is to make it easier for people to use cryptocurrency. Right now, it's kind of a dark art for people to mine coins. We plan on releasing a front end to the "mining" programs called CoinyeMiner. It will make things a lot more simple and people will be able to make their own coins. We're working round-the-clock to get everything going as smoothly as possible."