Crypto’s final boss has been beaten – this is going to change everything

About ten years ago an E4 sitcom called The Inbetweeners took the UK by storm.

It quickly became E4’s most successful programme ever, led to two successful films and spawned a series of memes that remain relevant to this day.

One of the most popular of these was the phrase, “completed it, mate.”

It was uttered by “Jay”, a compulsive liar always out to make himself look good and always failing miserably.

He was walking through a computer game shop with his friend Neil, showing off as usual. Here’s how their conversation went:

Neil: Oh that one’s meant to be awesome. [pointing at a computer game box] Jay: Completed it. Neil: It only came out last week… Jay: Completed it. Neil: What about this? [Picks up computer game box and shows it to Jay] Jay: Championship Manager? Completed it, mate. Neil: You can’t complete it…. Jay: Yeah, I know. But I got so good at it the FA offered me a role in the England set up. Neil: Did they? Jay: I took Woking from the Conference to the Champion’s League in six seasons. Stuff like that doesn’t go unnoticed, Neil.

After this, the phrase “completed it, mate” became such a cultural phenomenon that James Buckley, the actor who played Jay, started his own YouTube channel about computer games.

It’s called – surprise, surprise – Completed It Mate, and it has over 415,000 subscribers.

The reason I bring up the phrase is because a couple of weeks ago, IOTA, one of the world’s leading cryptos, basically completed the last boss in crypto, blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) known as “the trilemma”.

IOTA: “The trilemma? Completed it, mate.”

Trilemmas come up in many areas of life.

It is basically a choice between three important things, of which you can only ever choose two.

The most common one is the “good, fast, cheap” trilemma.

This one is common because it comes up time and again in working relationships and project management. In most situations, you can only pick two of the three.

But as I said, trilemmas come up in many areas of life and work. And crypto has its own.

Crypto’s trilemma is: scalability, security, decentralisation. It was first expressed by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, and up until now no crypto has solved it.

For example:

Bitcoin and Ethereum are secure and decentralised, but not scalable.

Ripple and Stellar are secure and scalable, but not decentralised.

Up until now IOTA was secure and scalable but not decentralised.

In order to make the IOTA network secure, it used something called a coordinator. This was a part of the network controlled by the IOTA foundation that kept the network, well, coordinated.

The IOTA foundation always said that once the network had enough volume they would be deactivate the coordinator. But many said this could never actually be done.

Over the last year, IOTA has been focused on getting to the point where it can deactivate the coordinator, with a project it nicknamed “Coordicide”.

And a few weeks ago IOTA’s co-founder, Serguei Popov, released a tantalising video saying they had solved the Coordicide problem.

“The main goal of this event was exactly to figure out how to kill this coordinator. We call it Coordicide. And I think we… we did it. There is a lot of work to do, but we did it”.

The video was released on 27 May, but it later emerged it was actually recorded in February.

Why did the IOTA foundation wait three months to release it? We soon got our answer. A few days after releasing this video, IOTA created a dedicated Coordicide website.

Here’s what IOTA said about it:

With the launch of the Coordicide website we are proud to unveil our blueprint for the Coordinator’s removal — a momentous step towards realizing IOTA’s promise as the first decentralized and scalable DLT. Removing the Coordinator from the IOTA network will realize a long sought after goal in the field of DLT: scalability without centralization. The solution itself is inherently modular, meaning that users will have ultimate freedom to tailor the system to their individual needs. Its implementation will be a major milestone in the IOTA Foundation’s goal of creating a truly enterprise-ready DLT.

IOTA released a white paper and made the mathematical proofs public. In short, it solved the trilemma.

Of course, it still has to implement it, but things are looking extremely promising.

And as you may expect, this news led to a significant price rise. IOTA went up 21% in less than 24 hours and 50% in less than three days.

It’s still up around 27% as I write this, even after crypto prices dropped over the weekend.

This isn’t good news for IOTA – it’s good for the whole of crypto

With progress like this, people like to take sides.

A lot of crypto communities are what’s called maximalists. That means they believe the crypto they follow should be the only one to succeed.

If you’ve ever heard the term “bitcoin maximalist”, this is what that means. A bitcoin maximalist believes the world should only use bitcoin and all other cryptos should die.

This is clearly an illogical view. But it has a lot of emotional sway. And we humans are, like it or not, ruled by our emotions.

Imagine saying there should only be one car manufacturer, or one phone maker, or one sports company, or one type of flower.

A better way to look at is, as long as the project you believe in serves a purpose and has real use cases, then most major development will bring more attention to it.

It’s like when a certain sports star does something extraordinary and brings attention to the whole sport. Think Tiger Woods in golf.

So when you add IOTAs solving the trilemma to EY’s free privacy tools for Ethereum – which I wrote about yesterday – you end up with much more interest in the whole crypto space. And that’s good for everyone.



A clear case of this comes from my colleague Eoin Treacy.

For the first time ever, this $600m money manager is now recommending a crypto

Eoin, as you probably know has a rare set of skills. He is an expert in technology and an expert in investment strategy. He managed a $600 million fund and has written books on trading.

Up until now Eoin has steered well clear of any crypto investments. But yesterday all that changed.

For the first time in his career, Eoin is recommending investing in a crypto.

And he comes at this from both a pure investment perspective and from a technology perspective. When you combine the two, amazing things can happen, as we’ve seen in the past with things like Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.

If you want to find out exactly why Eoin is now recommending a crypto, and which one he’s recommending, click here now.

But if you do want to find out, you’ll need to be quick. Eoin is only keeping the information online until 12pm TODAY.

Click here to ensure you don’t miss out.

Until next time,

Harry Hamburg

Editor, Exponential Investor

Category: Cryptocurrency