Litecoin [LTC]’s Charlie Lee speaks about cryptocurrency adoption and more

Charlie Lee, the Founder of Litecoin [LTC] recently appeared in an interview with DataDash’s Nicholas Martin. During the discussion, Lee speaks about cryptocurrency adoption. He also spoke about Bitcoin and Litecoin’s lightning network, privacy and much more.

He began by speaking of what intrigued him to make his mark in the crypto space. He explained that he learned about Bitcoin while he was working for the tech giant Google.  Adding to that further, Lee revealed that he was involved in the trading of gold and silver commodity back in the days. He stated:

“so I kind of had like the background for of the technical side of crypto and muscle to the economic side of crypto. So that’s why when I found out about Bitcoin I kind of really understood..kind of the power of decentralized money and how it can kind of revolutionize finance and be like a better version of gold and replace fiat.”

Discussing the same, Lee further said that he believed Bitcoin [BTC] was similar to gold but its better than gold in a way of cheaper transactions and cheaper storage.

Most recently the world has witnessed an economic crisis in places like Venezuela, Turkey and Argentina. When questioned as to why the crypto community has not been engaging itself in promoting crypto adoption in places like those, Lee responds by stating:

“Yeah, we’re still kind of early. Most people are still treating crypto as a speculative investment, right, so it’s more about buying and selling and holding the coin more than using it, so I kind of want to like help move us towards more like using the Bitcoin, Litecoin as payments, especially for countries like Venezuela where the currency is so bad. “

Next, the Founder speaks about expanding the crypto market by partnering with banks and promoting crypto adoption, revealing that they have bought a 9.9% stake at a bank. The foundation will also be working on creating wallets [like mobile wallets] to make it easy for people to get a hold of the currency and also spend it. However, not mentioning a clear figure of how many banking clients the foundation can bring to improve chances of crypto adoption, he stated:

“I’m clear now what the potential of this is. I mean we’ll see it when we get there I guess.. we want to create solutions and see if we can help foster adoption.”

Speaking about his recent tweet on atomic swaps and side-chains, Charlie Lee explains that with atomic swap on lightning network users will easily be able to move value across two chains. Further explaining that the concept will allow users to exchange values without bothering about the underlying network.

When asked about development updates in Lightning, Charlie stated that his team is not really concentrating on the atomic swaps. But working towards creating an infrastructure for lightning protocol, asserting that it works well. He also assured that the channels can be managed well so that users don’t have to bother about that aspect.

Further, he added that the major issue concerning lightning is the channel size, however, as it moves further away from the Beta stage the technology can be further improved and thus increasing size.

The two also discussed transaction fees for Bitcoin and Segwit protocol adoption.  When asked if he sees a higher block size or smaller block time for the Bitcoin network, Lee stated:

“I think that I don’t know yet, like there are various different improvements that can be made to Bitcoin to help it scale further and there may be other secondary solutions like Lightning Network that can help bitcoin scale.”

Moreover, Lee is certain that Litecoin helps with the Bitcoin scaling. In Lee’s opinion, most people do not understand the trade-off of increasing block size. Quoting an example of Bitcoin cash [BCH] he stated that BCH employs a 32 MB sized blocks if filled up fully, it becomes 32 times more than the size of Bitcoin which becomes difficult to manage.

The discussion further led to Lee speaking about privacy and fungibility stating that he is pretty excited about working on fungibility improvements to Bitcoin and Litecoin. In the future, Lee also sees Litecoin targetting the privacy aspect. However, Lee believes that not all exchanges accept privacy coins as it becomes extremely difficult to trace back the transactions to a particular owner.

Moreover, Lee believes that the government is not comfortable with privacy coins stating the example of South Korea which asked exchanges to delist all privacy coins.

Regarding, Zcash being listed on Gemini, the regulated exchange owned by the Winklevoss twins, Lee argued that Zcash is not private. He stated:

 “But from what I tell Z cash a lot of most of the transactions are not shielded.. because like it costs ..it’s just more cumbersome to use private transactions on Z cash and because there is an option most people don’t use private transaction on Zcash. So for whatever it’s worth today I don’t think Zcash is very private. “

However, he also agrees that it is a good sign that exchanges are accepting privacy coins like Zcash. Lastly, Lee concluded by discussing Litecoin’s roadmap for 2018 and 2019. Excitedly speaking about the much-awaited Lightning network, he said:

“I think I’m really excited about Lightning Network. I think that’s going to be a game changer for Bitcoin and Litecoin. It’s really the right way to to scale these public blockchains… using layer 2 solutions because you kind of get the best of both worlds. With Layer 2 where the base layer is still like decentralized secure and then you can scale to huge number of transaction per second also have cheap fees and even add some added privacy when you’re using lightning because your transaction is not broadcasted to everyone.”