Esteemed Members of the House (and future members):
The origin of symbols fascinate me and I have been thinking on how credits/votes/coins from the House of Coins would be called and represented.
I am not sure how many people have wondered why we use $ for dollars. To me it has always looked like a snake on a stick. On reading up about it, it seems that I am not the only person who made that connection.
From Wikipedia:
Greek mythology
...the dollar sign may have also originated from Hermes, the Greek god of bankers, thieves, messengers, and tricksters. One of his symbols was the caduceus, a staff from which ribbons or snakes dangled in a sinuous curve.There are other theories as well but since this is the sign of tricksters and bankers, I find this interpretation appealing. (Hermes=Mercury, mercantile and merchants, it is all related.)
Effectively the coins from House of Coins represent a vote and shares in how the bank will be used. (At this stage seems likely to be a mining venture.)
Since it is a system of bartering I have been considering an appropriate symbol to represent this.
Many cultures used and still use livestock as an primary unit for bartering. In some African cultures you still pay for your wife in cows. Wikipedia: "
A cow in Zimbabwe costs $500 and the brides family can ask for a cash equivalent of the number of cows they want.' The basic unit is cows and the cash is representative of the cow.
With this in mind (something more worthwhile than the dollar, something on which the $ is based rather than the other way around, a primal element for bartering) I wanted to find a symbol to represent this.
The first letter of the alphabet came to mind. Alpha.. or rather Aleph.
Wikipedia:
The name aleph is derived from the West Semitic word for "ox", and the shape of the letter derives from a Proto-Sinaitic glyph based on a hieroglyph
which depicts an ox's head.
In Modern Standard Arabic, the word أليف /ʔaliːf/ literally means 'tamed' or 'familiar', derived from the root |ʔ-l-f|, from which the verb ألِف /ʔalifa/ means 'to be acquainted with; to be on intimate terms with'.[1] In modern Hebrew, the same root |ʔ-l-f| (alef-lamed-peh) gives me’ulaf, the passive participle of the verb le’alef, meaning 'trained' (when referring to pets) or 'tamed' (when referring to wild animals); the IDF rank of Aluf, taken from an Edomite title of nobility, is also cognate.
The connotations of bartering, ownership and nobility seem to fit.
For a symbol, the Phoenician Aleph is an attractive one:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Phoenician_aleph.svg 
