This past weekend there was a large Bitcoin conference held in Miami that attracted many of the major crypto developers, programmers, journalists and userbase for seminars and workshops.

Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin, gave a very interesting presentation on the history of altcoins from 2010-2011.  He discusses some of motivations for creating an alt coin (such as Litecoin) as well as what unique features a few of them have that differentiates themselves from others.

During the Q/A at the end, someone mentions that Adam Back, the creator of HashCash, purportedly said that the ecosystem should just have one cryptocurrency, Bitcoin.  Otherwise new participants and laymen get confused and turned off when they learn there are hundreds of cryptocoins.

Charlie’s response was that he agreed with this position, that it would be helpful for the development, the marketing and the dispersion of the crypto meme, but that ultimately “people like choices.”  And that if it was not Litecoin that was the 2nd largest, some other token would be.  And thus Bitcoin users should be happy that Litecoin is the 2nd and not some other, like Dogecoin which has no actual development team.

[Note: the first few minutes of the video are missing. The slides are located here.]

Charlie also did an interview last summer with Newfination which covered Litecoin, Bitcoin and Coinbase: