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Charles Lee is a computer scientist, best known as the creator of Litecoin. He serves as the managing director of the Litecoin Foundation. As of July 2013, he also works for Coinbase.
Charles Lee is a computer scientist, best known as the creator of Litecoin. He serves as the managing director of the Litecoin Foundation. As of July 2013, he also worked for Coinbase.
Early life
Lee was born in Ivory Coast, moved to the United States at the age of 13, and graduated from high school in 1995. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science in 2000.
Lee's brother, Bobby C. Lee, is the founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange BTC China.
Career
For a decade in the 2000s, Lee worked for Google. His work for the company included writing code for Chrome OS. In 2011, Lee became interested in Bitcoin. In October 2011, he released Litecoin on Bitcointalk. He had written the blockchain technology based on the Bitcoin in his spare time while employed at Google. He released Litecoin to the public after mining only 150 coins. Lee has stated that he did not intend to compete with Bitcoin but meant Litecoin to be used for smaller transactions.
In July 2013, Lee left Google and began working at Coinbase, before the cryptocurrency exchange adopted the coin he had created.
In December 2017, Lee announced on Reddit that he sold almost all of his Litecoin holdings due to a perceived conflict of interest. He had been criticized for his tweets, which had a possible effect on the price of the coin. Lee sold or donated all of his coins except for a few minted in physical form which he kept as collectibles.
Lee is currently working full-time with the Litecoin Foundation on fostering Litecoin adoption.
From Miner to Developer
Along with many other early adopters of bitcoin who were also talented computer scientists, Lee began to experiment with mining. He also came into contact with Mike Hearn, a developer who worked on the core blockchain client software for bitcoin. These conversations and his interest in bitcoin inspired Lee to try his hand at developing his own digital currency, modeled after bitcoin. Lee was far from the only computer scientists and software engineer to make this attempt; in the early years of bitcoin, numerous developers were hoping to build the next bitcoin.
Lee's 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. Indeed, Lee and the other members of his development team used large portions of the Tenebrix source code. While Fairbrix was not a success, due to a pre-mining issue and software bugs that left the coin susceptible to a 51% attack, it was not a completely useless endeavor; Lee would adopt the proof-of-work protocol from Fairbix for his later work with litecoin.
