By CCN: Charlie Lee can’t seem to shake his reputation for offloading his Litecoin holdings near the peak. The Litecoin creator was featured in a podcast with Morgan Creek Digital Partner Anthony Pompliano where he fielded some tough questions both about his LTC portfolio and the state of the crypto industry. Something that you might not know is when Charlie decided to sell his Litecoins when the cryptocurrency was trading at approximately $300 he expected the price to go much higher. He said on the podcast:
“I actually personally did think it was going to keep going up. I didn’t think that was the peak…I thought it was going to hit $1,000.”
New episode is live w/ @SatoshiLite!
We discuss the early days of Coinbase, why he originally built Litecoin, how crypto evolved over the last decade, what the current challenges are, and where Charlie sees BTC & LTC going in the future.
Listen & learn!https://t.co/JcpLe8SXZi
— Pomp 🌪 (@APompliano) May 1, 2019
Hindsight is 20/20, and Lee says he gets asked about price all the time. But clearly, even he doesn’t know where the bitcoin or Litecoin prices are headed.
“If anyone tells you they know they’re lying. No one knows if the price will go up or down. I’ve seen a few bull and bear markets. Sometimes it recovers. Who knows? I think if anything, it’s good we’re seeing some recovery. But don’t go all in. I tell people never to go all in.”
The Litecoin price is currently hovering at $73, more than double where it was trading at the beginning of the year. Still, it’s a far cry from the $1,000 level that he expected during the bull run of 2017. Some of the things that he’s working on that could influence value is adding fungibility features to Litecoin to make it more private and ultimately more scalable. They are using a technology called Mimblewimble to make Litecoin more fungible so that “every [Litecoin] is equal to every other [Litecoin].”
The Litecoin price peaked at year-end 2017. | Source: CoinMarketCap
Lee on Bitcoin
On bitcoin, he believes it will eventually become the world reserve currency and that it will coexist with fiat currency. He expects that in the end, there will be a handful of coins to have value. He said:
“Bitcoin will be the major one and there will be a few other ones.”
In the interim, the bitcoin price will remain volatile as long as the future of the leading cryptocurrency is uncertain.
Coinbase Messed Up
Another thing you might not know about Charlie Lee is that he’s a former Coinbase employee. He touts the popular U.S.-based crypto exchange as the “most important company in crypto” for the sheer number of people it’s ushered into the space. But he doesn’t hold back either, saying that his former’s employer’s botched acquisition of Neutrino:
“They definitely made mistakes. The recent Neutrino acquisition was pretty dumb…When the news hit that people were upset, they doubled down on it and…we decided it was still the right thing to do. And they had to backtrack on that. That was pretty dumb and they didn’t handle it well.”
Pomp on Price
Lee isn’t the only one who doesn’t want to give crypto price predictions. Pompliano fielded a question from the podcast live audience about whether or not crypto winter is over, in response to which he said:
“More likely than not, we’ve probably seen the bottom. But as many people in crypto learned, trying to time this stuff is a fool’s game. So we’ll see how it plays out.”
Lee has come a long way from trading bitcoin locally at McDonald’s and Starbucks. The industry infrastructure has come a long way, too. While there’s no going back, if Lee ever decides to buy the dip, he’s probably going to hold onto his coins a lot longer next time. That’s just a guess.