MIT is getting serious about bitcoin. Or at least two students at the prestigious school are.
Jeremy Rubin (who studies computer science) and Dan Elitzer (President of the MIT bitcoin club) have managed to raise a whopping half-million dollars in order to distribute bitcoins to every undergraduate student at the school.
In all, each student will get about $100 worth of bitcoin — a significant amount — in what is being called an “ambitious project aimed at creating an ecosystem for digital currencies at MIT”,
“Giving students access to cryptocurrencies is analogous to providing them with internet access at the dawn of the internet era,” said Mr. Rubin.
“We decided to announce this project now to give students lead time. 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?” said Elitzer.
A majority of the funding for the project came from MIT alumni, with another chunk coming from the bitcoin community.
And while Rubin and Elitzer have no idea how students will use their bitcoin, the idea is to get them familiarized with the digital currency.
Plans include holding workshops with well-known entities in the bitcoin space such as Gavin Andresen (chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation) and Sean Neville (CTO at Circle Internet Financial).
At a school that is known for consistently innovating in the tech-sphere, the move could be great long-term for bitcoin.