Undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will be given $100 worth of bitcoins for educational purposes after two MIT students raised a half a million dollar fund by working together, the Guardian reported.
In an attempt to jumpstart bitcoin ecosystem, 19-year-old Jeremy Rubin, an undergraduate sophomore studying electrical engineering and computer science, and Daniel Elitzer, an MBA student at MIT's Sloan School of Management, raised more than $500,000, principally from Alexander Morcos, an MIT alum who works in high-frequency trading in New York.
The pair compared the gift of coins as the gift of an internet connection in earlier times, the Inquirer reported.
"We decided to announce this project now to give students lead time," says Elitzer. "We want to issue a challenge to some of the brightest technical minds of a generation: 'When you step on to 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?'"
"Giving students access to cryptocurrencies is analogous to providing them with internet access at the dawn of the internet era," Rubin said.
The MIT Bitcoin Project will grant each of the 4,000-plus MIT students $100 in Bitcoins, prompting the students to be studied and analyzed on their usage of the bitcoins.
Speaking to the Tech, MIT's student newspaper, the university's head of undergraduate education, Dennis Freeman, supported the bitcoin giveaway. "By bringing students and faculty together to inform members of the MIT community about what bitcoin is and to research its use, Rubin and Elitzer are helping everyone to better understand this emerging technology."
Students will also have opportunities to attend talks from people in the Bitcoin community as the project is on, according to the Inquirer.
Thomas Hardjono, executive director of the MIT Kerberos and Internet Trust Consortium, welcomed the start of the study.
"Bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies pave the way for personal data to be recognized as a new digital asset class," he said. "The MIT Bitcoin Project is a truly exciting venture that will provide the foundation for research into other classes of digital assets."
"This will spark new development," says Rubin. "Even if students simply use their bitcoin to buy stuff, someone has to build an architecture to enable buying stuff. And what if buying with bitcoin is really convenient? Maybe there will be an active conversion into bitcoin."
