Charlie Lee, the creator of litecoin (LTC), a cryptocurrency created to be the silver to bitcoin’s gold, has recently argued only a “handful of cryptocurrencies” are going to be used as money, and implied he isn’t to blame for litecoin’s 90% decline.
Speaking to Bloomberg, Lee noted that he’s focusing on increase LTC’s use by merchants. Although he didn’t offer the news outlet specific statistics on how well it’s going, he pointed out that he has been advising Taiwanese mobile device maker HTC, as CryptoGlobe covered.
He added that there are still a lot of scams in the space, which means only “the strong” are set to survive.
There’s obviously a lot of scams and currencies not useful at all, and those values will plummet. You are going to see some coins die, and the strong will survive.
Lee has notably been targeted by critics over the past year after he sold his LTC holdings late last year. Per Bloomberg’ article, he revealed he sold his coins via several trades, at an average of $200. At the time, his sale announcement was made as LTC got to $375, near its all-time high.
Currently, CryptoCompare data shows LTC is trading at about $32.8, after rising 4.5% in the last 24-hour period.
Lee’s liquidation, per his words, came to avoid a “conflict of interest” when he spoke publicly about the cryptocurrency. To some, however, the cryptocurrency’s founder used inside information to get ahead of others, and dumped the tokens he had on those who believe in LTC.
He was quoted as saying:
People lose money and they want someone to blame. And they think for some reason I had inside information, and that’s silly. At the time when I sold, everyone thought it would go to $1,000.
He declined to reveal how much LTC he sold, but noted he was already wealthy before selling all his litecoin. Some of the proceeds of his sale went to institutions like the Litecoin Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Digital Currency Initiative.
Per the report he still owns some LTC for transactions, and has been considering donating more of his funds. While he admitted him selling his LTC “had some effect on people’s confidence,” he claimed this was because “people are used to traditional public companies.”
He added:
Unlike CEOs of public companies I am not paid to increase the shares of the companies.
The coin’s decline has seen its use go down as well, as BitInfoCharts data shows merchants, traders, and speculators have stopped using the cryptocurrency as much as they used to. This presumably happened as bitcoin’s fees started dropping along with its price, and alternatives like Bitcoin Cash and Monero (XMR) – after its recent hard fork – gained popularity.
Lee created litecoin back in 2011, by slightly tweaking bitcoin’s open-source code while working as a software engineer at Google. He later on served as director of engineering at Coinbase, and at the time got LTC on the exchange while on its payroll. Soon after, he left to focus on the cryptocurrency.
