Charlie Lee, the creator and lead developer of the open-source cryptocurrency Litecoin, announced today that he has sold off all his LTC holdings, citing "conflict of interest."
In a Reddit post published earlier today, under the pseudonym "coblee", Charlie Lee notes that he got tired of being accused of manipulating LTC price via his twitter account.
"whenever I tweet about Litecoin price or even just good or bads news, I get accused of doing it for personal benefit. Some people even think I short LTC!"
For Lee, holding LTC is a conflict of interest because of his natural influence as the creator of the cryptocurrency. There will always be a doubt about his actions, he continues. For this reason, he decided to sell off and donate all his litecoins, except some physical litecoins kept as collectibles. Mr Lee says the feeling of not owning any LTC is refreshing and assures he is not quitting Litecoin development.
Mr Lee did not go into detail about the currency (fiat or crypto) in which he sold his LTC into. Commentators on the post congratulated him for speaking openly about his divestment decision, while others questioned his motives or seemed skeptical since there's no way to verify if Lee did sell all his holdings.
Read the whole post:
Over the past year, I try to stay away from price related tweets, but it’s hard because price is such an important aspect of Litecoin growth. And whenever I tweet about Litecoin price or even just good or bads news, I get accused of doing it for personal benefit. Some people even think I short LTC! So in a sense, it is 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 and donated all my LTC. Litecoin has been very good for me financially, so I am well off enough that I no longer need to tie my financial success to Litecoin’s success. For the first time in 6+ years, I no longer own a single LTC that’s not stored in a physical Litecoin. (I do have a few of those as collectibles.) This is definitely a weird feeling, but also somehow refreshing. Don’t worry. I’m not quitting Litecoin. I will still spend all my time working on Litecoin. When Litecoin succeeds, I will still be rewarded in lots of different ways, just not directly via ownership of coins. I now believe this is the best way for me to continue to oversee Litecoin’s growth.
Please don’t ask me how many coins I sold or at what price. I can tell you that the amount of coins was a small percentage of GDAX’s daily volume and it did not crash the market.
UPDATE: I wrote the above before the recent Bcash on GDAX/Coinbase fiasco. As you can see, some people even think I’m pumping Bcash for my personal benefit. It seems like I just can’t win.
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