CHARLIE Lee is known worldwide for creating one of the earliest altcoins – Litecoin.
But what is the story behind Charlie Lee and what’s his net worth?
Who is Charlie Lee?
Charlie Lee was born in 1977 in Ivory Coast, where his parents had lived since the 1960s.
When Lee was thirteen, he moved to the US and graduated from the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey in 1995.
Lee completed a Bachelors and Masters degree in 1999 and 2000 in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Lee then spent seven years as a software engineer at tech companies in California including KANA Communications (2000-2003) and Guidewire Software (2003-2007) before joining Google in 2007.
Lee was first introduced to cryptocurrency in 2011, when he read an article about Silk Road, an online marketplace that accepted only Bitcoin as payment.
Skeptical about the Federal Reserve System, he was already exploring investment strategies that would be less reliant on central banks.
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Lee’s subsequent chat with Mike Hearn, one of the developers of the core blockchain for Bitcoin, inspired him to be apart of the cryptocurrency revolution.
While he was still at Google, he bought his first Bitcoin from Hearn and started mining BTC.
Lee then went one step further and founded Fairbix, a blockchain payment system.
Lee and his team cloned the source code from Tenebix – another early cryptocurrency – but this soon failed shortly after its release in September 2011.
The failure was primarily down to negative press around excessive premining which is the creation of blockchain tokens before a cryptocurrency is released to the public.
Premining is a way to reward developers and early investors.
A software bug also gave control of the network to miners who destroyed the value of the currency by blocking the confirmation of new transactions.
But within weeks of Lee’s first cryptocurrency failure on October 7, 2011 he had created Litecoin (LTC).
Lee has always said Litecoin is not a competitor to Bitcoin and has always positioned Litecoin as the ideal cryptocurrency for small transactions, such as online shopping, and Bitcoin as the cryptocurrency for larger transactions, such as international payments.
In 2013, two years after Lee had founded Litecoin, he left Google and became an Engineering Manager at Coinbase.
Within two years, he was promoted to Director of Engineering.
By 2017, Lee had left Coinbase to focus solely on Litecoin as Managing Director of the Litecoin Foundation, a non-profit founded “to advance Litecoin for the good of society, by developing and promoting state-of-the-art blockchain technologies.”
In December 2017, Lee said he had sold or donated all his Litecoin holdings (except for a few coins to keep as collectibles) to avoid any conflict of interest.
He said whenever he tweeted about Litecoin, he would be “accused of doing it for personal benefit.”
He claimed even though he had “always refrained from buying/selling LTC before or after major tweets there will always be a doubt” about whether his posts were intended to put his “own personal wealth above the success of Litecoin.”
To avoid this he decided that no longer owning “even a single LTC that’s not stored in a physical Litecoin” was the best path forward.
Although he declined to confirm how many LTC he sold or what price he received, he said “a small percentage of GDAX’s daily volume and it did not crash the market.”
Lee said his primary goal is to “create sound money.”
He believes cryptocurrency is “a better form of money than human civilization has ever seen.”
The Litecoin founder believes there will eventually be only a few cryptocurrencies left in the market.
At that point, the currencies will “actually represent real value” and could become interchangeable, meaning someone could send Litecoin and the recipient could send Bitcoin that would be converted automatically.
He believes as merchant adoption builds and user experience improves, mass adoption will follow, and cryptocurrency will be used like traditional money.
He said: “Things will get simpler, and that is when things will take off.”
Charlie’s brother Bobby Lee is also the founder and CEO of BTC China, Bitcoin’s cryptocurrency exchange in China.
What is Litecoin and what are the differences to Bitcoin?
Both Litecoin and Bitcoin are decentralized, peer-to-peer cryptocurrencies that allow instant payments anywhere in the world without a third party.
But Lee made LTC with a number of changes to Bitcoin.
Litecoin is a Bitcoin fork which means it’s a currency which took the Bitcoin source code and made a few changes.
Lee built Litecoin with a number of differences which addressed flaws he identified with Bitcoin, including accessibility, speed, volume, and cost.
By choosing a different mining algorithm (scrypt algorithm as opposed to Bitcoin’s SHA-256), Lee made mining accessible to anyone with a standard computer unlike Bitcoin, which required the processing power of a graphics processing unit (GPU).
This was successful initially but was short-lived as it was no longer profitable to mine Litecoin without a more powerful mining rig.
Lee also designed Litecoin to be more ‘spendable’ than Bitcoin. This was possible through faster block creation, higher maximum circulating supply, and lower transaction fees.
Lee designed Litecoin to produce blocks four times faster than Bitcoin as well as have four times the maximum circulating supply and much lower average transaction fees than Bitcoin.
What is Charlie Lee’s net worth?
After graduating from MIT, Lee was a software engineer in Kana Communications for three years and earned around $110,000 per year.
As a senior software engineer at Guidewire Software, he made around $160,000 a year.
At Google Lee will have earned between $250,000 and $340,000 a year based on his experience.
While at Coinbase Lee is likely to have earned around $440,000 a year.
On the Litecoin Foundation website, Lee’s salary is displayed as $0 but it has been reported Lee’s net worth is around $1.2billion.
