The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is blessed with three Gs: good luck, good will and generosity as two of its students successfully raised half a million dollars to support what earlier seemed like an ambitious project that intends to distribute $100 in bitcoins to every undergraduate MIT student this fall.
The brains behind the proven-doable project are Daniel Elitzer, a freshman at the MBA program in MIT Sloan as well as founder and president of MIT Bitcoin Club, and Jeremy Rubin, a sophomore student at the electrical engineering and computer science department in MIT.
"Giving students access to cryptocurrencies is analogous to providing them with Internet access at the dawn of the Internet era," Rubin says in a statement.
MIT alumni are providing majority of the funding for said project with substantial supplementary support coming from the bitcoin community. The pledge of over $500,000 will cover the bitcoin distribution to all 4,528 MIT undergrads and the informational activities and infrastructure needed for the project.
The goal of the project is to create an ecosystem for digital currencies at MIT.
The project includes collaborating with researchers and professors at the institute to analyze how students can use bitcoins and encouraging both academic and entrepreneurial activity around the institute in such a promising field. They admit they have yet to discover how these students will make use of their bitcoins, though they will maximize their time between now and the time of distribution to establish an ecosystem in the institute.
It was also clear to the organizers that not all bitcoin endeavors were successful. An example is Mt. Gox, which was the biggest bitcoin exchange in the world when it filed for bankruptcy protection in Japan last February after losing virtual bitcoins worth close to half a billion dollars because of computer hacking. That's why the organizers assured the security of their exchanges through the assistance of computer scientists and staff in MIT as well as organizations facilitating digital currency payments.
Regardless, many are in support of the bitcoin project, seeing it as a chance for people to examine how data can be utilized.
"Bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies pave the way for personal data to be recognized as a new digital asset class," says Thomas Hardjono, the MIT Kerberos & Internet Trust Consortium's executive director.
Faculty supporter of the bitcoin project, professor and Dr. Alex Pentland, even calls the initiative "an awesome hack."
"While the specific properties of bitcoin have some real problems, getting everyone at MIT to start playing with bitcoin ... will prompt the MIT community to begin thinking seriously about how we can live in an all-digital future," Pentland says.
The organizers announced the project ahead of time to give lead-time to students and to challenge them to think of how these undergrads are going to use the bitcoins.
"We want to issue a challenge to some of the brightest technical minds of a generation: 'When you step onto campus this fall, all of your classmates are going to have access to bitcoin; what are YOU going to build to give them interesting ways to use it?' " says Elitzer.
