Charlie Lee’s deleted tweet revives Dash/LTC instamining drama

In all these years, there’s two things that I learned about crypto Twitter: every coin already is or will soon be the next Bitcoin, and there's no way to subtly delete a tweet. Litecoin creator Charlie Lee learned that second part the hard way recently, when his attempt at Twitter sleight-of-hand once again reignited an ancient Dash vs LTC instamine debate:

In short, Lee posted and subsequently deleted a tweet comparing the LTC and Dash instamines. For the uninitiated, instamining occurs when a large portion of coins are mined in the few hours after the digital currency launch, as investor interest is peaking.

It’s safe to say Dash had one of the most infamous instamines to date, when 2 million coins - or about 15% of the total Dash supply - were mined in just 2 days following the launch. To date, many claim the Dash instamine was purposeful as well as nefarious, and deem the launch of the currency unfair for a number of different reasons.

Although on a much smaller scale, LTC too faced some instamining or - as Lee calls it in this case - ‘fast mining’ issues at launch, which is what he was addressing via his now-deleted tweet. In it, Lee maintains that while the initial mining difficulty was set too low in both cases (hence instamining), the difference is that everyone had a ‘fair chance’ to mine Litecoin, whereas Dash gave preferential mining treatment to ‘friends’ of the project early on:

Lee soon removed the tweet, which prompted the above and few other reddit threads accusing him of trying to hide his hypocrisy after people began to call out LTC’s own instamining issues.

However, just as the reddit crowd was sharpening their pitchforks, Lee popped by the thread and addressed the accusations directly, basically saying he removed the tweet because he didn’t want to stir any unnecessary drama. Oh, sweet irony.

And while Lee’s response was enough for some, it only opened a new can of worms with the rest of the r/cryptocurrency subreddit.

Some Dash supporters claimed the mining difficulty problem was inherited from Litecoin anyway, and that the lack of Windows binaries at Dash’s launch (another one of Lee’s gripes) is a non-issue:

Some also argued that Coindesk covered up LTC’s instamining issues:

While most simply engaged in long-winded and entirely fruitless debates about the two instamines:

To Lee’s credit, he also visited a similar thread on the Dash subreddit, which unsurprisingly got a collective aneurysm from his tweet:

In it, Lee explained the main gripes he holds regarding the Dash launch, all of which he believes contributed to an unfair and preferential treatment for the initial batch of miners:

When mentioned that the low difficulty bug was inherited from Litecoin, Lee doubled down on calling it a bug in the first place:

In the end, some decided there’s only one reason why people would decide to bring 8-year old instamining issues back into the limelight - pure, unadulterated jealousy: