Xinxi Wang is a director of Litecoin Foundation, Developer of Litecoin Core and CEO of Coinut Exchange. Here is our exclusive no bias interview with this great guy! We speak about price predictions, MimbleWImble, Monero and a lot more.
How and when did you get into crypto space?
– I got into this space in 2011 when I was still doing my PhD degree in Computer Science. My college programming teacher posted on Google Buzz that something called “Bitcoin” could revolutionize the economy of the world, I searched on Google and downloaded the whitepaper and found it really interesting, and the more I researched into it, the more I found it amazing. Then, I bought some in 2011 when the price was very low.
Since you are a skilled coder who could choose any currency what make you go with Litecoin?
– In 2016, I tried to choose between Bitcoin and Litecoin because they were the two major cryptocurrencies. The reasons that I chose Litecoin were that Litecoin had a much more efficient and coherent team where you could make significant contributions without fighting back and forth and it had a great potential to be the payment crypto because of its shorter confirmation time and cheaper fees.
Please, explain us Coinut project that you run.
– Started in 2013, Coinut.com is a crypto exchange based in Singapore and Toronto with pairs of major cryptos and fiats including Canadian dollars, Singapore dollars, and USD. Litecoin is a quote currency that can be exchanged with all other cryptos/fiats directly. It was the first Bitcoin options exchange launched in 2014 and then went through Adam Draper’s Boost VC accelerator and then pivoted to a spot crypto exchange in 2017 to gain faster growth. Now we have about 500K global users.
Do you suggest Loaf over all other soft wallets for Litecoin? If so – why.
– Yes, absolutely. The major reasons are its credibility and usability. It’s mainly developed by Loshan and Kerry Washinton of the Litecoin Foundation. It is fully opensource; the code can be found on Github. It is always up to date, whenever there are changes to Litecoin, LoafWallet will be first to get notified. It has been tested by more than 200K global users.
Do you think like ETH, LTC could go into PoS mode at some point ? If not why do you think Pow Is better.
– No. I don’t see advantages of PoS over PoW. People criticised that PoW consumes energy. But that energy was used for good, i.e., security. PoS has problems like the rich get richer, and that if a group of people controls more than 51%, no one can break that control, while for PoW, you can invest more hash power to break the control.
Feb 7, 2018 you, Tweeted that target for LTC is $10,000 you thought we would see 10x increase per year. Knowing what you know today, why did this didnt work ?
– That’s a long-term average. We’ve seen that on Bitcoin and Litecoin in the past. We are still at the beginning of the logistic growth curve, which exhibits exponential growth https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-biology/chapter/environmental-limits-to-population-growth/. But there are also short-term bull and bear cycles, in which, you could get higher than 10x or less than 1x respectively. It is hard to predict short term cycles.
Litecoin plans to add MimbleWimble. Is it better than Monero’s CT? And if so – why or why not.
– Monero’s ring signature based CT has the issue that its UTXO (TXO to be exact) set is ever growing and thus causes scalability issue. MimbleWimble is effectively CT + CoinShuffle and thus doesn’t have this issue.
Do you think we can get decentralized exchanges due to atomic swap so coins could just exchange with no one above?
– Yes. Actually, in the future, we will be able to send Litecoin to wherever Bitcoin is accepted seamlessly through atomic swaps. And the lightning network will make the swaps easy, fast, and cheap. The impact to Litecoin could be big.
If it was not about LTC, any other projects you endorse?
– Bitcoin. Both Bitcoin and Litecoin have their unique niche markets. Bitcoin has strong security and is good for a store of value and large transfers. Litecoin has a good fit in small transfers or daily usage.
Ethereum has some potential in apps having extremely high demand in trust and verifiability and very low demand in efficiency and scalability. But I think that the market is small.
LTC halving is coming. What price do you predict by then?
– Check 2015. Perhaps this year can be even better than in 2015 because of lightning network and the coming privacy features.