Meet Charlie Lee, a celebrity within the cryptocurrency and blockchain technology community. He is the person responsible for the creation of Litecoin, one of the earliest Bitcoin derivative cryptocurrency. Lee previously worked on various projects at Google, including Google Play Games, Chrome OS, and YouTube. So, even if you do not own any cryptocurrency yet, you have probably already benefited from Lee’s work.
Lee has an international story behind him, having been born in the Ivory Coast after his parents emigrated to Africa from Shanghai in the 1960’s. His move to the United States, at 13 years old, enabled the start to his impressive career that allowed him to rise from computer science to shaping the future. Charlie Lee attended MIT. He studied Computer Science, undertaking Bachelor’s and Master’s degree program. He graduated in the year 2000, with a Master’s degree in the field of Computer Science.
For more than a decade after the graduation, Lee worked for a number of tech companies, including Guidewire Software and Google. Fresh out of MIT, Charlie got the first job at Kana Communications where he worked as a software engineer. He worked there for three years before going to work at Guidewire Software. Charlie spent four years at the firm as a senior software engineer and left Guidewire in July 2007.
He started working at Google in September of 2007 as a software engineer. At Google, Lee worked on a number of projects such as Play Games, YouTube Mobile, and Chrome OS. In July 2013, Charlie left his post at Google after being with the company for five years.
Charlie Lee has admitted that he first came across Bitcoin in 2011 while he was still at Google. Prior to his discovery of Bitcoin, he had been actively trying to get involved with the gold trade (despite his aptitude for computer technology, Charlie also holds an interest in economics).
Like many early adopters of Bitcoin, Lee began by getting into Bitcoin mining. At some point, he reached out to one of the developers of the core Bitcoin blockchain client software, Mike Hearn, and soon bought a single Bitcoin from him. With advanced degrees in computer science and a decade of being a software engineer, Lee wanted to create his own cryptocurrency just like Bitcoin. At that time, creating the next Bitcoin was all the rage and there were already a number of Bitcoin imitators.
But the first attempt at creating a cryptocurrency wasn’t a success. In September 2011, Fairbix was created. The cryptocurrency was similar to Tenebrix which had been launched earlier in the year. Charlie and other members of the development team used the Tenebrix source code and made a few adjustments. Fairbix used a PoW protocol that ran on Scrypt which Lee would later use when creating Litecoin. The project had been a failure, but prepared the ground for further exploits.
Less than a month after release of Fairbix, Charlie Lee launched Litecoin (LTC). This time, he used the core Bitcoin source code and made a number of adjustments to suit what he felt were improvements on some of the problems with Bitcoin. These changes include the hashing protocol, the average block transaction time, the GUI, and the total maximum supply cap value.
Despite sharing some similarities with Bitcoin, Lee has almost always maintained that Litecoin is not a Bitcoin competitor. Instead, he claims that Litecoin is more of a complementary cryptocurrency to Bitcoin. Lee regards Litecoin as the cryptocurrency best suited for smaller transactions like online retail shopping.
