Charlie Lee

• Lee was born in the West African nation of Ivory Coast.
• He moved with his family to the United States when he was 13.
• Even from the earliest stages of his professional career, he showed a keen interest in computer technology.
• He was one of the first people that were hired to work at Coinbase.
• Prior to his discovery of Bitcoin, he had been actively trying to get involved with the gold trade.
• His personal background and economic beliefs led him to approach the Federal Reserve System with skepticism.
• In his search for a way of investing that was less reliant upon standard financial means, he became highly interested in bitcoin and the new blockchain technology that supported it.
• He has appeared as a guest on Real Vision.

CRYPTOCURRENCY

• While working at Google in 2011, Lee learned about bitcoin while reading an article on Silk Road.
• His first cryptocurrency project was called Fairbix.
  • He developed this coin in September 2011, modeled after both bitcoin and Tenebrix, a currency that had been released earlier in the year.
  • There have been a pre-mining issue and software bugs that left the Fairbrix susceptible to a 51% attack,
  • While Fairbrix was not a success, it was not a completely useless endeavor; Lee would adopt the proof-of-work protocol from Fairbix for his later work with litecoin.
• Litecoin was modeled after the core bitcoin code, with several adjustments that Lee felt would improve upon bitcoin.
  • These included the hashing protocol itself, the transaction time for blocks and the total maximum supply cap value, among others.
  • Despite sharing some similarities with Bitcoin, Charlie has almost always maintained that Litecoin is not a Bitcoin competitor. 
  • He affirms that Litecoin is more of a complementary cryptocurrency to Bitcoin.
  • He believes that Litecoin is more useful for smaller transactions like online shopping, while bitcoin could be more useful for major international transactions.