A New Name for Crypto, Part 2
Your ideas for important rebranding
Ric Edelman: It's Tuesday, August 1st. I did a show on the fact that crypto is a terrible name. [Time for a Name Change; July 25] Anyway, just, you know, acknowledge that crypto is a terrible name and cryptocurrency is a misleading name. And I lamented that fact and asked for your suggestions and boy, I got a lot of them.
Thomas - he wrote, Ric, we ought to call this e-money. Well, that's not a terrible idea, Thomas. I kind of get it. E For electronic, the world of commerce online is often prefaced with that e. The problem, though, with e-money is that crypto isn't always about money, and that's kind of the trap that crypto is currently in. People associate it always with the conversation of money. That's simply not accurate.
Wayne also uses the E. He suggests E-solarium, which is really interesting. Solarium comes from the Latin of salt and was the original way that in fact our word salary comes from this. And so I kind of like that idea. But again, it's got a money connection. He also suggests cyber solario as a playoff on Solarium. The problem - that still connects us with cyber and crypto, which is what I'm trying to get away from. He also suggests ether funds. The problem with that, of course, is that it's a direct link to Ethereum and that's way too narrow a conversation, but good ideas all around. Wayne, thanks for the suggestions.
And these two guys weren't the only ones to offer an E link. Steve suggested E bucks, which has the same problem as E money. Even worse because Bucks is such a colloquial phrase. He also suggested C bucks for blockchain, I presume, which I don't really think works any better than bucks. But he also has a couple of really interesting ideas: chain coins, cloud coins. I really like cloud coins, although coins is another reference to money. Let's face it, we are all associating these blockchains with coins and it is all in the cloud, isn't it, in one way or another. So cloud coins has nice alliteration. I think that's pretty cool Steve.
I like that idea Michael suggested: Stella Currency. Problem is, we're trying to get away from the notion of currency, and Stella, a lot of people don't realize that not only is Stella an existing digital asset, but more fundamentally, Stella was actually money. Back in the 1800s, the US government issued a coin called Stella. It was a $4 coin, minted over a period of around 40 years or so. Coin collectors love to collect Stella's. So Michael, you're on to something. Unfortunately, the US government beat you to it by about 150 years.
And then Bobby made one comment that is near and dear to my heart. He said, Ric, you've already named all of this appropriately - blockchain and digital assets. That is, of course, the name of our certificate program, the Certificate in Blockchain and Digital Assets.
Unfortunately, Bobby, as much as I coined that phrase, it's clunky and I'm afraid isn't terribly catchy at all. So we're still at, you know, ground zero here. We're still starting from scratch. If you've got any thoughts, give me your name suggestions for how we can improve on crypto and cryptocurrency.
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