The founder of Litecoin, Charlie Lee recently took to twitter to offer a counterargument along with an explanation for LTC’s Instamine. It should be recalled that a certain crypto was launched exactly eight years ago via Litecoin’s Blockchain. The initiative was short-lived and didn’t seem to yield any success.
Now, after Litecoin’s detractors criticized Lee over Instamine, the LTC founder has given an update on how the whole situation played out at that time bringing in questions like; could Instamine have been handled better?
The Story so Far With Instamine
As Litecoin is now approaching its next halving event in a matter of days. During which time LTC’s Blockchain’s block reward will be split into half (by 50%), the 8-year-old controversy surrounding the genesis of the currency has been resurfaced by LTC’s Detractors. These ones have criticized Lee and how he handled the ‘Instamine phase.’ This refers to the early days of the asset’s launch.
Instamining is a process in crypto where coins are distributed initially in an uneven or maybe an unfair manner. For example, Instamining involves the release or putting coins in a disproportionate sum to a handful of crypto miners and investors as well. In this case relating to Litecoin, at the time it had been decided that the digital currency went through a similar phase just days after the launch.
Deleted Tweets on the Matter
Despite the Instamine event occurring more than eight years ago, Lee recently renewed the controversy after he published or tweeted about it. Lee posted and then deleted a tweet that appeared to attack rival crypto Dash.
In Lee’s tweet which has since been removed, the Litecoin founder attempted to explain what happened during the Instamine phase. He did this in addition to pointing out how fellow digital asset Dash may have committed a more serious offense than LTC before removing the Tweet. The tweet immediately triggered a backlash from the crypto community. Users were angry about Lee’s original tweet on Instamine and its removal didn’t kill the matter as well.
Lee May Have Deleted His Tweet after Attention Was Drawn to Litecoin’s Alleged
Contentious Mining Actions
Some members of the crypto community are actually speculating that Lee had withdrawn his tweet after he drew the attention to Litecoin’s alleged contentious mining behavior. It was outlined in a Reddit post that was directly addressing the issue. It is clear that Litecoin underwent an accelerated mining phase which caused the production of no less than 500,000 LTC in only 24 hours. Lee defended his actions in a new post. In his words:
“If I knew the actual hashrate at the time of launch, I would have set LTC’s initial difficulty higher. However, it was better to be on the low side in order to protect against 51% attacks as of the time of launch, and that is what I did.”
As the founder of Litecoin explained, the coin’s launch back in 2011 actually constituted the early days of cryptocurrency as a whole and Lee was still mostly feeling out the path of getting his virtual currency up and running. Only a few could have imagined that at that time Litecoin would hold a total market capitalization of $5 billion after nearly a decade.
