Cryptocurrency

This Story Made Me $43.68 Before I Even Finished Writing It

How you can do the same, and be part of transforming the world in the process

One of Warren Buffett’s famous pieces of advice is to only invest in what you know.

But in a world where everything changes so rapidly, how can you get to know something well enough to be willing to make an investment?

You can pay for expensive courses. But isn’t it better to get paid to learn?

On one level, it sounds too good to be true. But I’ve done it.

I’m still nowhere near an expert but last night I got paid $43.68 just to learn a little about cryptocurrencies.

It was worth it to check my email!

I have an account with coinbase, where I’ve dabbled a little bit by buying Etherium and Bitcoin (later moved Bitcoin to another account). All the other coins listed in my account above, like Algorand, Zcash, etc…are from this giveaway.

The videos were extremely short, only 1 or 2 minutes, and they give you $1–3 worth of currency depending on the offer.

That is orders of magnitude more generous than normal. There are platforms like Swagbucks which give payouts to viewers in exchange for watching ads, but the incentives are usually tiny. There, you’re trading hours for pennies.

The generosity of coinbase makes sense though. The thing that gives any currency value is its ability to be used for exchange. A thing is only valuable if someone else will trade for it. And people are more likely to regard something as valuable when we have skin in the game. I care about the value of dollars because I have them in my wallet. I don’t really care that much about Yuan or Euros, because I don’t use them. Coinbase and its affiliates are trying to put these coins into our wallets so that we will care about those coins.

And it worked.

I’m going to be buying a lot more crypto. Mostly Etherium because I think it has the right combination of utility and adoption to take a really dominant position in the coming years. But the willingness to put money directly into users' pockets tells me that some of these other platforms are worth a look too, and maybe even a larger place in my portfolio.

Celo uses phone numbers as the account, so remittances can easily be sent to non-tech savvy family members in other countries. It sends a text that directs the recipient to the app store to download Celo and shows them how to get their money.

Algorand overcomes many of the problems that hamper Bitcoin. It will never fork. The leger is quickly and efficiently updated, verifying transactions within seconds rather than minutes or hours. It can scale without costing tremendous amounts of energy and computing power.

Zcash is a lot like Bitcoin, but private. No one else can see how much money is in an account or what the account’s previous transactions have been.

Stellar Lumins aims to be a kind of “financial universal translator” that can instantly and cheaply convert any kind of currency to any other kind of currency without intermediaries taking a giant chunk. Just imagine the geopolitical and economic ramifications of pulling this off.

Compound allows cryptocurrency to not just sit in accounts but to be deployed in a kind of money market. Your money makes money for you. You can also borrow against the collateral of your own coins.

I still have a lot more to learn about cryptocurrency, and realistically I probably won’t get paid for most of it. But as I elaborate on further in this article, I’m a big believer in making money while you learn.

You can connect with me at [email protected]