Charlie Lee the creator of Litecoin which has been called the silver to Bitcoin's gold made this wild price prediction that Litecoin could drop 90% in value back on December 11, 2017. This tweet came after Litecoin had already run up to about $160. You can see the date on this tweet if you look closely.
Charlie Lee also later sold all of his Litecoin a few days later around the $250-$300 range so that he could start to focus on developing the cryptocurrency more than focusing on investing into it. At least this is what he claimed.
Charlie Lee also predicted the flipping of Bitcoincash and Litecoin in terms of marketcap back in February of this year, and this has recently happened.
The main thing I'm wondering here is if Charlie Lee has enough influence in social media to start a bear market or a bull run, or if he has just been in crypto long enough to expect this kind of crazy price action to happen. However, now it seems like there are more crypto influencers out there than before, so I think his opinions of what will happen in crypto are going to become less influential to the market in the future. There are several more influencers out there such as Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance, Brian Armstrong-The CEO of Coinbase, Roger Ver, and the list continues.
I think it's clear though if you listen to Charlie Lee talk that he is still more interested in what can be done to make Bitcoin faster, more scalable, lower fees, etc rather than focusing all of his attention on Litecoin. However, I still think he is taking the development of Litecoin seriously.
If we are looking at some of the biggest influencers into cryptocurrency then we should look at some of the data conducted by Clovr back in August 2018, even though it's a little outdated. The blockchain research and gambling company Clovr "surveyed 500 self-proclaimed blockchain enthusiasts about the influencers they follow for insights, updates and predictions. People were asked to choose from a list of nearly 80 influencers and their preferences were combined with the total number of followers each industry figure has on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Youtube to create a meta-ranking." news.bitcoin.com. Clovr found John McAfee to be the most influential person in blockchain news.
Here is the link to the full picture of what that research looks like: https://www.clovr.com/page/ranking-blockchain-influencers
The research study which is based on data on August 9th 2018, named John McAfee as the most influential person in Bitcoin followed by Vitalik Buterin, and Charlie Lee in 3rd. The study also named Andreas Antonopolous as the 4th most influential person, and the study also named Justin Sun as the 5th most influential person. Since this study is 4th months old the influencers that should be on this list could probably be different.
The study Clovr conducted also went further to include data such as the most followed blockchain influencers on social media (pulling data from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube) and listed John McAfee at over 1 million followers and Vitalik at over 830k followers as well. The study went further to try and break down who the most popular person to follow was based on each gender and found that women did not prefer to follow John McAfee as their favorite source of cryptocurrency information.
Even further, the study went on to show that the Democrats tend to follow McAfee, Buterin, and Cameron Winkelvoss the most, and that McAfee, Charlie Lee, and Justin Wu were more popular with Republicans. All of this being said, this is just a survey taken from August 9th, 2018 so not all of this data is going to be accurate right now.