Hey everyone:
Some thoughts from a Whitecoin investor.
I've been purchasing WC ever since the crisis began and the price started crashing, because I fell in love with the story of the community effort that rallied together and worked together to successfully raise from the ashes a coin that had plenty reason to die - but for the community that rallied behind it. I still love that story even as WC sits at below 100 sats, and it is because of the continued effort and goodwill of the community that I continue to buy WC on a daily basis at what I believe to be a bargain price. Even if the coin falls to below 50 sats, I will consider it an even better bargain and continue buying. I hold most of my WC in my wallet, and for the past couple of weeks I've enjoyed watching it stake again and again.
I am completely unconcerned about the price bottoming out because I am into WC for the long term. In fact, I'm thrilled at the opportunity to continue to buy in to this community effort ... this fabulous story that resonates with me as an embodiment of the very same qualities that made me fall in love with cryptos in the first place, the idea that the people of the world can wrest control of our economies from the corporate conglomerate banking system that by all effects has plunged our world into perpetual war and underwritten the toxification of every aspect of our planet's eco-system - our air, water and food supply. Some may think this is a bit of a stretch, but forgive me for seeing in WC a microcosm of a much bigger drama being played out. WC is the only coin out there that I've seen embody this ... which is why as the price of WC falls, I've sold my other positions and am going all in. At the risk of waxing a bit too poetic, there really is something to believe in here.
It seems that with the price of WC so low and with WC, arguably, well-removed from the spotlight - along with a new logo on the horizon - the coin is, more than ever before, at the Reset stage. Therefore, I think now may be the perfect time to address something that I think is, at the very least, worth addressing. I bring this up because I want to be in for the long, long term. Cryptos, in general, I feel, are a long way from mainstream acceptance and use ... but when that day eventually arrives ... and I am confident that it will ... I hope WC is right there with the best of the coins.
What I'd like to address is the name: Whitecoin
For those outside of the crypto world, those who might be entering for the first time ... those who will probably not know about the blackcoin/whitecoin story and the story of the absentee dev, along with the resurrection of WC ... the name Whitecoin carries with it inescapable connotations of race. We can see examples of this every time someone throws in the phrase "white power" into the discussion, albeit tongue-in-cheek. Although I love the WC story and the community behind it, I have reservations suggesting WC to someone outside of the crypto communities ... newcomers to whom I'd give investment suggestions ... because even saying "Whitecoin" out loud sounds ... alienating ... disenfranchising.
I know that WC was never meant to harbor these subtleties, but I believe the fact remains that this undertone is inescapable ... and for a coin that I'd love to see rise to the top of mainstream acceptance, that's a pretty heavy barrier to break through. Not impossible, certainly ... but a heavy-laden barrier, nonetheless.
Additionally, WC deserves to break free from its association with Blackcoin.
I could very well be completely wrong about this and may be opening a can of worms that only adds additional difficulty at this time. If so, let this comment be buried and forgotten. If not, perhaps there is an easy solution. Perhaps a name change that incorporates the "W" might have support. Perhaps "W Coin". Or perhaps "Webcoin" (although there already exists a Webcoin that seems to have died in 2012).
Anyway, just some thoughts, for what they're worth.
Hi eddienova,
Thanks for taking your time to write here and I truly hope you will continue to support this coin.
I think everything you say makes perfect sense and I have been thinking along the same lines as you do. I have also invested a lot into this coin for the long-term and I have just kept buying as the price went lower and lower.
When I started to work with the task of re-branding the Whitecoin logo (
http://whitecoinfoundation.org/) when no one else was up for the task, I quickly realized that it was harder than I thought. So first of all, white is as most people know not your typical color and as you can see with the logo submissions for the competition (
http://wc.oizopower.nl/vote/) you can clearly see that some participants struggle to even include any white at all.
So what is really the color white? When I started to think about that, the one thing that came to my mind was lightning. Lightning has that pure white light. White light is what the human eye sees when all the colors that make up the visible light spectrum are combined. Technically the color white is therefor all colors combined.
Anyway so my idea has a lot to do with your concerns, because I wanted to give the word White a meaning that was the total opposite of ignorant beliefs such as "white supremacy". White is not a color, it is ALL colors. I took the idea of lightning and encapsulated it in an orb and it turned out to be great as an icon for the software as well (remember Whitecoin is first of all a software). Now I am sure the concept could be improved further and even possible to animate in 3D for a loading screen (something I have started to look at, but we will have to wait until the community decides what it wants to do) for the software and such. But anyway if you embrace this kind of idea, that white light is all colors, I think we get quite far away from a racist image.
That said, I still understand the concern with the name and if it was up to me I would change the name to Lightcoin (but that would give us another problem I guess!) -- but that's another reason I focused on the energy ball as a logo, it gives us that flexibility should we ever want to change. When you think of branding, a group's logo often does not mirror the name but is more a reflection of that group's culture.
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I want to again thank you for supporting this coin and if you haven't already, you should join our official IRC channel (#WhitecoinFoundation @ Freenode) to discuss and keep yourself updated. For anyone reading this that doesn't know how to access the chat with an IRC client, you can also use this page:
http://whitecoinfoundation.org/chat.html.
