Bitcoin has found a fair amount of popularity with both young people and the technologically literate, so it should come as little surprise that students at one of the most prestigious technical colleges in the world would house some of its more fervent devotees. So fervent, in fact, that the president of the local chapter of the Bitcoin Club at MIT has announced plans to donate $100 worth of bitcoin to every MIT undergrad, no strings attached.
While the act might serve as a social experiment of sorts concerning what people will do with free money, one of the two students behind the plan, undergrad Jeremy Rubin, has something far more grandiose in mind. His hope is that by introducing every student to BTC via a free sample, MIT could become, in his words, the “center of the bitcoin world.”
Or the center of learning how to convert bitcoin into Keystone Light and ramen noodle cash. Or the center of business for the bitcoin-accepting Overstock (OSTK) . Or, more charitably, perhaps it will make MIT the center of the bitcoin world, in which the MIT experiment creates a domino effect, similar to how Facebook (FB) spread from Harvard to other colleges before becoming a global phenomenon.
But any way it shakes out, it looks like the donation is going to happen, starting in the 2014 fall semester. The two students behind the project raised over $500,000 from various donors, more than enough to cover the more than 4,500 undergrads expected to attend in the fall.
So whether the experiment sparks an evangelist-fueled "bitcoin revolution" or the "hundred dollar's worth of pizza" revolution, one thing for sure is that no MIT student will be ignorant of bitcoin any longer.
Watch the Bloomberg interview with the two students who spearheaded the project, Jeremy Rubin and Dan Elitzer, below.
