Litecoin, The Brainchild Of Charlie Lee

Most often, companies resemble their creators, who convey their character traits, attitude to life, and energy to their business. This heredity is noticeable in the details of development, in the difficulties that project faces and how it reacts to them, in client and community relationships, in resilience.

Stamp of the creator

You can recall Elon Musk, his Hyperloop and Tesla. He is a charming, impulsive man, confident in the effectiveness of the engineering approach in solving any problems. Elon easily captivates other people and is eagerly looking for new areas for applying his energy. Or the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto. He was the ancestor of all cryptocurrencies, the engine of the new industry. He inspires envy and respect, the desire to imitate and compete. All of this was included in a single document by the genius - white paper, a technical description of the new digital money.

There is nothing mystical about the similarity of the creator and his offspring; on the contrary, it is natural that a bright personality releases a project that carries its features. Whose other qualities can it get? Knowing the vision of the world in the head of the company's founder, his temperament and attitude to others, we can understand what to expect from a company and predict its development direction and prospects.

Charlie Lee

Exaltation and self-promotion are not peculiar to him. He does not attack someone with his statements, does not exaggerate his own abilities, does not walk over the heads of others. Charlie Lee gives the impression of an educated, intelligent, adequate and inconceivably calm person.

How did he and his Litecoin find themselves on top of the cryptocurrency market - the industry, where the screams and excitement, the insistence on the verge of rudeness and narcissism are almost mandatory characteristics of the project and its participants?

Industry man

After emigrating to the United States with his parents at the age of 13, Charlie Lee followed the typical path of a good programmer: school, MIT, work in large and small software companies, work in Google.

Unlike many other talented IT engineers, Lee, having become interested in Bitcoin in 2011, decided to make his own version of this cryptocurrency. Litecoin, which he created the same year, became one of the first altcoins (and one of the most successful).

However, in those days, Charlie hardly expected that his work will receive at least some recognition and become popular. According to him, the creation of LTC was fun, and in 2013 and 2014 he even abandoned the project, preferring Bitcoin.



In 2013, when Litecoin existed for a relatively long time but didn’t achieve great success yet, Charlie got a job at Coinbase. At that time, this US cryptocurrency exchange was actively developing and attracting money from venture investors. Lee became one of the first hired third-party specialists.

Insider or not?

In 2017, when Charlie Lee left Coinbase, one of the few scandals in the career of Litecoin’s creator took place. When Lee became a member of the exchange team, he was already known as the creator of LTC, but in the coin hasn’t been listed on Coinbase for three years more.

Charlie's voluntary departure took place less than a month after the appearance of LTC in the number of exchange tools. Accidentally or not, altcoin’s rate began to grow even before the trading on Coinbase started. Many considered this situation to be suspicious.

The following event added fuel to the fire though: in December 2017, when Litecoin reached the highest price, Charlie Lee decided to sell all his existing LTC assets in order to avoid a “conflict of interest” and wrote about it.

New suspicions and accusations followed. There were those who linked the events in one sequence: LTC appears in the Coinbase listing, the rate is growing steadily, Charlie Lee leaves the stock exchange, the rate reaches a maximum, then the creator sells all his coins, the rate falls.

The emergence of Litecoin

A month before the introduction of LTC, Charlie Lee, along with other developers, made the attempt to give the world a new cryptocurrency. The Fairbix coin was launched then, which became the successor to another - Tenebrix. Neither the first nor the second were successful and collected a lot of complaints during their short life, the main ones were inadequate pre-mining size and lack of immunity to “51% attack”.

The work on the bugs did not last long: as early as October, Charlie Lee presented Litecoin, a “silver for Bitcoin gold,” as he will say later, describing the ratio of LTC to other cryptocurrencies.



The connection between Bitcoin and Litecoin is strong, because the main cryptocurrency has become the basis for the younger relative. Charlie Lee made changes to the BTC code that made LTC faster and cheaper: the production time of the new unit was reduced to 2.5 minutes; instead of the SHA256 hashing algorithm, Scrypt from Tenebrix was introduced, the maximum number of coins was quadrupled (84 million).

Litecoin as a Bitcoin’s satellite

The creator of Litecoin subsequently repeated it many times: his offspring is not a Bitcoin opponent, but an addition to it. This is a cryptocurrency that eliminates the disadvantages of BTC in daily use and is better suited for the general public. Bitcoin is for large transactions, while Litecoin is for small amounts.

Charlie Lee is always ready to show respect for Satoshi Nakamoto’s work and does it regularly. His popular Twitter account is called “Satoshi Lite”. Also, when the Bitcoin support community was divided on the introduction of SegWit, with the support of Lee, this update appeared in the Litecoin code much earlier than the BTC developers proved the reliability and security of SegWit.

The same thing happened with the Lightning Network - Litecoin provided support for dispelling all doubts about the transaction security outside the main chain of blocks of the distributed ledger. The first experiments with atomic swap technology, where the user sends one cryptocurrency, and the recipient accepts another, occurred with the use of LTC.

What Charlie Lee is doing now

After leaving Coinbase and selling all of his assets in LTC, Charlie Lee concentrated on working with his brainchild and is fully involved in its development, but he does not disregard other phenomena of the blockchain industry.

Litecoin creator invests in other crypto projects. Look at his Crunchbase profile:



Charlie Lee acted as an advisor when HTC was creating its blockchain-smartphone EXODUS 1:



One of the main interests of the Litecoin’s creator is to give LTC anonymity functions in order to increase flexibility and convenience for users. During his chat on Twitter with the main cryptocurrency developer Monero Riccardo Spagni, the cooperation of two projects was announced. One of the aspects of such collaboration includes the adaptation of the atomic swap technology between them:



A promising partnership at the crossroads of traditional finance, cryptocurrency, and Fintech was announced in 2018:



Together, Litecoin and TokenPay bought out 9.9% of the shares of German WEG Bank AG, agreeing to increase this share after the permission of the German financial regulatory authorities. More recently, the news about joining the LISK project partnership appeared.

Charlie Lee loves joking and beats criticism politely:



Litecoin Foundation prefers k-pop to all the music genres:

Listen what Charlie says!

The founder of Litecoin is known for his accurate predictions. In December 2017, when cryptocurrency rates soared into the sky, Charlie cooled the enthusiasts down warning that a long-term decline would follow after the peak:



Lightcoin will overtake Bitcoin Cash in 2018:



One of his latest forecasts is dated February 4, 2019. “When will the price of Bitcoin again reach $ 20,000?”, the user of the official Litecoin Telegram channel asked. The admin with the nickname “Charlie Lee” answered:



Well, Charlie Lee rarely makes mistakes, and three years is not that long.