All MIT students will hand out the equivalent of $ 100 in bitcoins

Two cryptocurrency enthusiasts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - students Dan Elitzer and Jeremy Rubin - managed to find funding for an unusual experiment . They want to create a Bitcoin ecosystem based on MIT. As part of the experiment, each student of the institute will receive a bitcoin wallet, which will be the equivalent of $ 100. Students can spend this money as they please. Elitzer and Rubin want to make sure that on the MIT campus the Bitcoins are distributed just like ordinary money or payment cards.

Project initiators want to see what happens if bitcoins become a publicly available and generally accepted means of payment in a small local community. Now bitcoins are still a lot of enthusiasts scattered around the world and communicate via the Internet. If everyone has Bitcoins on the MIT campus, this can give a strong incentive to local businesses to arrange to accept payments for them. If students appreciate the advantages of Bitcoins and start using them every day, this can spur the development of software related to cryptocurrency, the emergence of startups based on Bitcoin.

In total, Elitzer and Rubin were able to attract $ 500,000. This is enough to distribute the required amount in the fall to 4,528 students and organize information support for the experiment, in particular, to agitate the local business by September to arrange for accepting bitcoins. Jeremy Rubin compares this experiment with providing students with free access to the network at the dawn of the Internet era - for many of today's technical specialists and Internet entrepreneurs, the path to a profession or business began with a university or community network.