The idea behind litecoin was to improve the efficiency for transactions actually utility of Bitcoin
But we made it faster. It's two and a half minutes for per block as opposed ten minutes for Bitcoin
The general idea was to kind of complement Bitcoin. I
Saw it as I kind of marketed as silver tip acquaintance code
I see like when Bitcoin working side by side and so this is not a competing
Cryptocurrency effectively, you actually really do see it as a symbiotic relationship I do
But it's in some sense. It's competing right? It's competing for my share. Definitely
It's a different coin. So if people using like coin
They may not use Bitcoin. So it does compete a little bit but I I see it more as a complementary
What got you interested because I mean you have a very different background than most people
first of all
You you were not born in the United States or even China as I understand it you came from the Ivory Coast
Yeah end up there. Well, my dad was there he had a business so grew up in Ivory Coast
He came to the US and when I was a teenager, and did you come with your family at that point or?
Okay, actually I came by myself
Boarding school in the East Coast. Do you mind my so you went to boarding school on the East Coast?
This is a choice of your families or was this something that was interesting important to you?
Um, it was a choice of my family. I think the
the environment in in Ivory Coast
was getting a little bit crazy with
overthrowing of the governments and just
demonstration on the streets so
The decided to send me my brother to boarding school
also for a better education and
So from boarding school on the East Coast you then went to MIT where you focused in computer science, correct, correct?
Yeah, and from MIT you went to the west coast. Yeah, my
Dollie been there ever since and and that was roughly 2000. Yeah at the peak of the dot-com boom
So you got to live through the peak of the dot-com boom. He began working for Google when I'm
2006
so this would have been right after Google and public then a couple years after a couple years over a
2007 2007. Yeah, okay and
When you think about that transition to Google one of the things that Google has encouraged its its employees to do is to take time
To focus on personal projects the said where is that where you're interested in bitcoin and litecoin?
Emerged or how did you move from?
working on Chrome, which was what are your projects as I understand it Chrome OS actually, yeah to
Focusing on crypto. Yeah, I was actually just spending all my time outside of work on
cryptocurrencies
Yeah, I found out I found about Bitcoin in 2011 and kind of just went down that rabbit hole and
Been I guess in it ever since what was the motivation? What cost you what got you interested?
What was other than the mathematical challenge of crypto which I know can be exciting for some people? Yeah
I kind of I saw Bitcoin as a better version of of gold actually a better form of money then that we've ever seen
And that just captured my attention. I've always
understood how gold and silver were used and throughout history as as money and
how
How we came to the fiat currencies we have today and I just saw Bitcoin as just kind of very similar to gold but better
And it could actually replace the current monetary system
And I also understood like the the math and the cryptography behind it
So just really captured my attention
a lot of people became interested in Bitcoin
You know the work of Satoshi was published in the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis
Was that a motivating factor for you looking at the current system and saying this didn't work or yeah, definitely like I saw that
for one thing
Currently we have a system of money that the government can inflate away, right?
they can with quantitative easing x' and other things they can just print more money and
devalues everyone's currencies and I also saw that because of that you
It's not good to keep your money in
Bank right because your money will become
less valuable for time so it kind of forces people to
To essentially gamble with their money, right? Do you have to put it in a stock market or some other asset class?
That doesn't get devalued or that has
potential of
making more money and it effectively just keeps
the same purchasing power right because of devaluation the US dollar and if you make
three five ten percent on your
Investment effectively. Just keeping the same purchasing power. So I think it's just a broken system and with
With something like gold or a coin. It's probably it's a better form of money. I would say
and so are you ambivalent between
The idea of an alternative currency in the form of gold versus Bitcoin or like claim or is it?
Do you see the need for an electronic version because of the challenges of gold trap? Yeah
I mean gold is is great
Government can't devalue it
It's fixed supply, right?
But the problem is there's storage cost and then if you want to transfer it, it's not easy to transfer gold cross country across borders
But something like bitcoin and litecoin
it has
Pretty much all the good properties of gold except it's not physical and then you can store it cheaply and you can transfer it
Cheaply, it's just a better form of gold
So one of the challenges that I always look at when I look at this idea that it's a better currency. Mm-hm, right?
There's a school of thought that says currencies are
about
the efficiency or the ease of use
Right, which definitely crypto and human arguments behind things like electronic gold or gold scrip, etc
by and large attempt to address
Certainly. Our credit based system is is much more associated with the ease and facilitation of transactions
But there is a second role which is the role of the state. All right, which has a monopoly
At least under current constructs on violence and the enforcement of contracts
As it relates to those currencies, how do you think about crypto addressing?
those dynamics and and
The transition process right in which the state will ultimately have to forfeit that monopoly
For my point of view. I don't think the state needs control of money
Right money is just a way where people can transfer and store value, right?
There's no reason why the state needs to have control over it
I mean, I've only recently have we do we have like the concept of fiat currency where the state has control over it
I mean for throughout history, we've always used
things like gold and silver as as real money as ways to transfer in-store value and I think
Bitcoin will help us get back to that better kind of way of
people using money
You