Charles Lee, also known as “Chocobo,” is a computer scientist and former Google engineer who is best known to be the creator of Litecoin, the “silver” cryptocurrency version of Bitcoin. He contributed to its development until 2017 and now he holds the position of managing director at Litecoin Foundation. ^[1]

Education and Personal Life

Charles Lee was born in Ivory Coast and later moved to the United States when he was 13 years old. He graduated from the Lawrenceville School in 1995, and then he started his degree in Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lee holds an MEng in Computer Science from the same institution. ^[2]

His brother Bobby C.Lee, is the creator and head of BTC China, a cryptocurrency trading platform. ^[3]

Career

Charles Lee began his career as a software engineer at Kana Communications in 2000, later moving to Guidewire Software in 2003. He then went on to work for Google, where he contributed to projects such as Youtube Mobile, Chrome OS, and Play Games. ^[4]

After the launch of Litecoin in 2011, in 2013 Charles Lee left his position at Google and accepted a position as Engineering Manager at Coinbase, a digital currency exchange that had recently been established. He was promoted to Director of Engineering within two years.

He is a Board Member at Valkyrie and BTCs Inc. ^[4]

Litecoin

Charles Lee stated that it was an article about Silk Road, an online marketplace that only accepted Bitcoin as payment, that first sparked his interest in cryptocurrency. He was intrigued by the idea of a digital currency that is resistant to censorship and a potentially superior form of money compared to traditional options. ^[5]

And I think it will replace fiat as money that everyone will use. So, like right now, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is still just a speculative asset and you know it’s been 10 years we haven’t really scratched the surface like the whole becoming real money.

Lee created an altcoin called Fairbrix in September 2011, a clone of another altcurrency called Tenebrix. Nonetheless, Fairbrix was unsuccessful due to a software bug. The software that Fairbrix utilized, called Multicoin, was designed to work with multiple types of coins. However, a bug caused issues with the initial block generation of Fairbrix, resulting in the failure to produce coins. ^[6]

Later in October, he launched Litecoin by combining code from Bitcoin to address the bug that contributed to the failure of Fairbrix. While Litecoin shared some similarities with Bitcoin, it also had some key distinctions. Litecoin's maximum coin limit was 84 million, as opposed to Bitcoin's 21 million. Additionally, it utilized the Scrypt proof of work algorithm from Tenebrix, which aimed to make the mining process more accessible to a wider range of individuals. ^[6]

In 2017, Lee posted on Reddit his decision to sell and donate all of his LTC in order to avoid a conflict of interest, as even though he has avoided mentioning the token’s price, his tweets have been criticized for manipulating the price.

… it is a conflict of interest for me to hold LTC and tweet about it because I have so much influence. I have always refrained from buying/selling LTC before or after my major tweets, but this is something only I know. And there will always be a doubt on whether any of my actions were to further my own personal wealth above the success of Litecoin and crypto-currency in general. For this reason, in the past days, I have sold/donated all my LTC.

• Charles Lee on Reddit

Today, Charles Lee is a vocal supporter of cryptocurrencies and serves as the Managing Director of the Litecoin Foundation. This non-profit organization collaborates with the Litecoin Core Development team to promote and advance the Litecoin project.