1729.com
I was planning on writing about this a bit later, but I knew I’d be referring to it often from here on out, so why not give a brief overview now? I’m talking about the ultra-informative and proactive newsletter started by Balaji S. Srinivasan called 1729.com. Balaji is “an angel investor and entrepreneur. Formerly the CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he was also the co-founder of Earn.com (acquired by Coinbase), Counsyl (acquired by Myriad), Teleport (acquired by Topia), and Coin Center.” He is an extremely intelligent man and his 4-hour-long episode on The Tim Ferris Show is packed with such interesting and useful information. He mentioned his newsletter on the episode, and it was just starting at the time of airing. I signed up immediately and have been amazed at the information and content that arrives in my inbox semi-regularly. The name 1729 is a tribute to Indian mathematician Ramanujan who could do complex equations without proof. The number 1729 is the sum of two different cubes in two different ways he said.
This isn’t any normal newsletter; this newsletter pays you to do challenges or even learn a skill. The idea is to prevent children, or anyone really, from falling through the cracks and going unnoticed. If you have access to a phone and the internet, you are able to take part and complete the tasks set by the newsletter. It’s giving people in rural areas an opportunity to learn, be noticed and even be paid along the way. A few US Dollars go a long way in countries with weaker currencies, and this gives anyone the chance to change their current living situation. The idea isn’t to remove these high performers from their current situation, unless that’s what they want, but rather to improve their situation and help them make a living on the internet. These payments will be made in Bitcoin or Ethereum because anyone can have a wallet and there will be no complications with banks. I’ve archived every email from 1729.com and have taken part in a few of their challenges. There are so many interesting lessons and challenges to choose from, but these few should give you an idea of what this project is about.
The first challenge I started was learning the Ethereum coding language solidity. I haven’t done much coding before, but I’ve always wanted to learn. The 1729 challenge was to complete the first five lessons of Crypto Zombies as fast and as accurately as possible. The first 10 people to finish were paid $100 in ETH each. That’s a nice chunk of change if you’re converting it to Indian Rupees or Brazilian Real. I still haven’t finished all of the 18 lessons, but I found it very interesting. There’s no way I could compete with anyone with previous coding experience, but it made me understand it a bit more and motivated me to learn Java Script. The website cryptozombies.io is free and anyone can learn how to code in solidity. It gamifies the learning experience and teaches you to code by creating your own army of zombies that all look different. The lessons take you through every step of the process helping you understand how the language works. I found it tricky to remember everything and got frustrated at times when I’d forget one thing that wouldn’t make the code work. It’s great for problem-solving and I haven’t thought this way in a while. The only problem with solidity is that it’s a language only on Ethereum, so anyone wanting to create something on Ethereum has to learn the language. Some of its competitors accept multiple languages making it easier for programmers to write code on their platforms.
Another task that pays you to learn and help people is to create a tutorial for a core primitive on Solana. Solana is a next-generation blockchain built to scale DeFi to global adoption, without sacrificing censorship resistance or security. It’s similar to Ethereum but has lower fees and faster speeds. The only problem is that the developer experience needs to be improved. They need quality documentation, tutorials and technical content created about the core DeFi primitives. The core DeFi primitives are:
Token swap/automated market maker functionality.
Minting a token and using it within a wallet/smart contract.
The task is to create a tutorial on one of the above primitives to make it easier for developers to deploy projects. The winning tutorial for each primitive will be paid $1000 in USDC (a stablecoin), be featured on docs.solana.com and promoted on all of Solana’s community channels. This task isn’t for everyone, but it’s possible with limited resources, an internet connection and some time. These tasks are giving everyone a fair chance at being paid some good money for their work.
There are so many interesting tasks that push people to learn and grow. They gave out $10 in BTC to people who posted proof of workout, by posting their smartwatch dashboard. They paid people to do research on crypto-friendly jurisdictions and give detailed reasons why that place is a perfect fit. They even gave $100 in BTC to anyone who could come up with a @boredelonmusk-like tweet to get people thinking about innovation and what changes they would like to see in the world. There are a few I’d still like to attempt. One is a book review of the book Indistractable by Nir Eyal and another is a review and feedback of a blog post by Jon Stokes about cryptocurrency and its potential. Both could get me an extra $100 in BTC and I’m already writing every week anyway, so why not?
I’m very excited about this newsletter and the change it could make in the world. It might not do it on its own, but it is paving the way for others like it. It’s purely motivated by bettering people and motivating others to learn. It’s already pointed me in new directions I hadn’t thought of and I feel like it’s just getting started. This is such a productive use of a wealthy person’s money and I hope to see more follow suit.