Bitcoin Forum

Over 4,500 undergrads will each get $100 worth of bitcoin for free once they come back to school this fall as two MIT students plan to conduct the world's largest experiment with the virtual currency.

"We decided to announce this project now to give students lead time," Dan Elitzer, founder and president of the MIT Bitcoin Club, said in the release. "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,” said Rubin.

“What I’m hoping is that infrastructure gets sufficiently built around MIT that bitcoin actually becomes a useful commodity to have,” Rubin said as cited by the Tech. “I think that MIT should be absolutely the center of the bitcoin universe. As a school that’s a leader in technology and science fields … it’s kind of a shame that we’re not already at this point,” he added.

In 2013, Rubin worked with three other undergraduates on a bitcoin-related project called Tidbit. That experiment, however, ran into trouble: it was subpoenaed by the New Jersey attorney general as part of a consumer fraud investigation. MIT has sent a letter to the New Jersey attorney general in support of Rubin, who is still fighting for the subpoena to be withdrawn. In fact, Rubin and Elitzer met in the fallout of the Tidbit subpoena.