S7 E8: Charlie Lee on Video Games, Star Wars, and Investing

Charlie Lee is best known as an early bitcoiner who got into mining and also created Litecoin. Some remember him for the way he dismissed Craig Wright’s claims in 2016 by signing the genesis block, others remember the way he helped defeat the SegWit FUD in 2017 to help scale Bitcoin, and some also know him as 25% of the Magical Crypto Friends show.

Yet very few people know that Charlie Lee is an early investor in companies such as Lightning Labs, Casa, and Bitrefill. And when he doesn’t finance start-ups, he supports experimentation with extension blocks and the privacy of MimbleWimble. If this attempt succeeds, then Bitcoin will be able to have confidential transactions without hard forking and with full auditability.

In spite of all these remarkable accomplishments, I’ve decided to invite Charlie Lee to the podcast and talk about video games and Star Wars. It might seem like a wasted opportunity to get some interesting information on technical topics, but the internet is already filled with quotes and audio bits of his statements, and Charlie already does regular appearances on the Magical Crypto Friends show.

Furthermore, the point of Bitcoin Takeover Season 7 is to not talk about Bitcoin and try to focus on hobbies. In Charlie Lee’s case, I already knew that he’s into video games (his tweet about Fallout Shelter gave it away), so I was very interested to hear more about his background and how what kind of games he grew up playing.

I was pleased to discover that Charlie’s video gaming experience goes back to the 1980s and he has been around during the various phases of the video game industry. He has played point and click MS-DOS PC games (Money Island, Leisure Suit Larry), he got into Nintendo games (Mario, Zelda), and he made the switch to Xbox (today he admittedly owns the new generation Series X).

Also, since Charlie Lee has some Star Wars merchandise in his living room, I’ve asked him a few questions about the Star Wars universe… but we ended up talking about Star Wars video games anyway, as many of them are objectively great and memorable.

This interview is really geeky and accomplishes its goal to ignore Bitcoin topics fairly well – until we get closer to the ending, that is. You can also hear Charlie Lee giving some investment advice, and according to his experience it’s still better to buy Bitcoin than to invest in Bitcoin companies.

You can listen to Charlie Lee on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and my RSS feed (no signup required, so it’s the best choice for your privacy).

Also, you can win a Trezor One hardware wallet by replying with the correct answer to the question below. Click the image and you’ll be redirected to the Twitter thread.

If you enjoy the content, please consider making a BTC donation or a recurring dirty fiat donation on Patreon. Regardless of the way in which you contribute, I will add your name in the Hall of Patrons.

This episode is sponsored by Vaultoro & Trezor

If you would like to help the show, there are two ways you can do it:

Sign up for Vaultoro and start trading with hard money (Bitcoin, gold & silver)*: https://vaultoro.com/bitcointakeover

Buy a Trezor hardware wallet to improve your security with the power of open source: https://shop.trezor.io/?offer_id=10&aff_id=4735&tiny_url=1

*Attention: the information presented is not financial advice. Only start trading if you’ve made prior plans about it, you’ve done market research and/or you have consulted a financial advisor. All trading involves risks and you are responsible for your own decisions.