Litecoin Halving Should Already Be Priced in, Says Charlie Lee
The Litecoin (LTC) halving, or reduction of the Litecoin block mining reward, should already be priced in by the market as everyone knows about it since the beginning, according to Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin, currently the 5th coin by market capitalization, and the Managing Director of the Litecoin Foundation.
The thing is, he notes, that people expect the price to go up, so many are buying in, and it ends up being “a kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“I think we’re seeing a bit of that today,” Lee said in an interview published by Crypto Love YouTube channel on July 7th.
However, while the price is estimated to go up in the long run, Lee says it’s anybody’s guess how it moves short term.
At pixel time (13:07 UTC), litecoin trades at c. USD 108 and is down by around 10% in the past 24 hours, week and month, while it’s still up by 47% in the past 12 months.
Litecoin price chart:
The second Litecoin’s halving is estimated to happen on August 5 and will reduce the digital currency’s rate of new supply in half, to LTC 12.5 per mined Litecoin blockchain block. According to Lee, halving is always a shock to the system and some miners will not be profitable and “will shut off their machines”.
But if a large percentage of network shuts their machines off, then it would slow down the network for some time. “For Litecoin, it’s two and a half days till next change, so possibly seven days”, explains Lee, adding that the mining difficulty will readjust and everything will be fine after that period.
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Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s next halving is expected in May 2020, and Lee doesn’t see Litecoin and Bitcoin following a similar pattern. The two coins are different, Lee says. “It depends on the macroeconomics of crypto at the time.”
In the interview, Lee has also discussed bitcoin price forecasts.
At the end of last year, co-founder of the first Chinese cryptocurrency exchange BTCC, and Charlie Lee’s brother, Bobby Lee, famously predicted USD 333,000 per bitcoin by 2021, asking his followers on Twitter if they thought this would happen, which most did not. The creator of Litecoin says he doesn’t agree with that prediction, and that it’s not good to try and predict prices because no one actually knows what will happen.
When jokingly asked by the host about USD 333,000 per LTC, Lee also jokingly replied: “That’s definitely gonna happen.”
Watch the whole interview below:
