One of the most common concerns of people investing in Bitcoin is its slow transactions and transaction fees. And for this reason, Litecoin has become popular. It is cheaper and could be mined way faster than Bitcoin. LTC founder Charlie Lee believed that Litecoin could be the silver in the crypto world as Bitcoin remains the gold standard.
In a recent interview, Lee discussed a lot of things including the future of Litecoin. Lee mentioned that he will soon be leaving Litecoin team completely. His goal is to make the cryptocurrency completely decentralized. Last year, Charlie Lee announced that he sold all of his Litecoin shares.
Litecoin and Bitcoin
In the interview, Charlie Lee mentioned that Bitcoin and Litecoin are “working close together”. He claims that Bitcoin and Litecoin can reinforce each other and have a different purpose. He discussed that Bitcoin is more decentralized mainly because it has an anonymous creator. And for Litecoin to be decentralized, he needs to step away from the cryptocurrency eventually.
“Litecoin is more centralized because I’m around, so it has more centralized development team, has more centralized foundation. I can steer litecoins towards my vision, and people will listen to me because I created it”
Lee also mentioned that he actually stepped away from Litecoin a bit two years ago. He then focused on the development of better use for Bitcoin at Coinbase during this time. However, he said that decentralized coins should not have a leader that can still control the direction of the digital currency.
“For a currency to really be… a worldwide decentralized currency, you can’t have.. a real leader who ‘s trying to control things, so to make it more decentralized, eventually, I would step away”.
In December 2017, Lee mentioned that he won’t quit and will fully devote his efforts even after he sold his Litecoin shares during the time when the market was at its peak. Lee mentioned that he decided to sell the cryptocurrencies because of “conflict of interest”. He later admitted that he regrets this decision.
Move Towards Inflation
Charlie Lee envisioned that there could be a problem once litecoins have all been mined. This can be a problem mainly because miners will no longer be incentivized to mine Litecoin. His idea is to have a minor inflation. This means that there will eventually be additional litecoins in order to adapt to a depleting number of the cryptocurrency.
Could this actually be good? The increase of supply could actually help stabilize the price of Litecoin. It is quite possible that if Litecoin is simply going to stick to its current supply, the price of the digital currency will become unstable in the long run. You can expect the fees to rise making it impossible to use Litecoin for microtransactions.
It seems that Charlie Lee is learning from Bitcoin’s experience. Bitcoin already has this problem when it comes to processing microtransactions. Could you imagine how bad the problem could get for Bitcoin if all coins have been mined in the near future? By adopting an inflation model, the price can be stable and miners can still have something that they can work for.
