MIT aims to give bitcoin research, development a stable homehttp://www.betaboston.com/news/2015/05/25/mit-aims-to-give-bitcoin-research-development-a-stable-home/Bitcoin survived a wild youth marked by drug trafficking, money laundering, theft, bankruptcy, and political spats. Now, the digital currency is getting cleaned up and heading to grad school.
A fledgling project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab is offering researchers and software developers a quiet home to work on bitcoin’s core technology, a computer science breakthrough that lets people trade money securely without paying a middleman.
Media Lab leaders hope that, by acting as a safe home for research and development, MIT can help the sprawling bitcoin software project shed its chaotic past and emerge as a more versatile technology platform.
If the idea works, bitcoin’s underlying technology — known as the blockchain — has a chance to become a new digital system that makes transferring money or signing a contract as cheap and simple as sending an e-mail.
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