Litecoin developer and founder, Charlie Lee during Tuesday’s Money 2020 conference revealed how he got inspired by Bitcoin in 2011 to develop his own Litecoin. He also explained why cryptocurrencies generally, are one of the better forms of money ever developed in the history of mankind.
Lee, during the conference, gave reasons why fungibility is one major reason why privacy is required in our world today. Lee stressed his point by saying that money is meant to be spent, however, the user decides whether to spend it or not and this is why it is valuable.
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Lee, comparing Bitcoin and Monero, said that Bitcoin is not fungible as it can always be traced back to where it came from. Hence, the received Bitcoins cannot be ‘fresh’ and if these Bitcoins were utilized in carrying out shady transactions, to prevent future transactions, the address for those Bitcoins can be blacklisted. On the other hand, Monero’s blockchain is opaque- the coin’s transaction history cannot be looked up.
Lee continued by saying that Bitcoin lacks one good feature which is fungibility. He explains fungibility as two $200 bills are essentially one and the same. He then compares it to Bitcoin, which, when transferred to someone, the person is allowed to see the amount of Bitcoins the user has. He said that, as far as privacy is concerned, it is not a good thing and no one is meant to know how much money a person owns.
Charlie Lee said: “Right now, there are some altcoins that are doing a lot of privacy-related improvements like, Monero [XMR] with RingCT, Zcash [ZEC] & Tezos [XZT]. New innovative technology is turning blockchain upside down.”
Lee, concerning the bad side of privacy, takes Monero’s Bulletproof update, which makes transaction size smaller by 90%, but still larger than the transaction size of Bitcoin, and concluded saying that “it doesn’t scale as well as Bitcoin”. Charlie Lee says that when it comes to cryptocurrencies, he is very optimistic about the future of privacy and that Privacy and regulations will always battle each other.
Litecoin is an open source software project and a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency released under the license of MIT/X11. It makes use of an open source cryptographic protocol for creating and transferring coins. By market capitalization, Litecoin is ranked seventh ($3,062,223,987). Its price for today is $52.02 and has a current circulating supply of 58.9 Million coins. It has a 24h trading volume of $567,385,677.
