Bitcoin project MIT: what happened to the participants in the experiment.

Bitcoin project MIT: what happened to the participants in the experiment.

Imagine that in 2014 you received $100 worth of bitcoin (BTC) for free. If you had held it until now, you would have earned more than 5000%. This is exactly the chance given to students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as part of a campaign aimed at developing the BTC ecosystem on campus.

In 2014, electrical engineering and computer science student Jeremy Rubin and the university’s Bitcoin Club founder Dan Elitzer launched an ambitious project to build a digital currency ecosystem at MIT.

The main goal of the experiment was to help students and turn MIT into a global center where ideas related to bitcoin are studied and developed. The project plan contained various activities and work with professors and researchers to study how undergraduates use BTC.

The bitcoin project caused a serious stir in various groups at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. To launch the experiment, Rubin and Elitzer raised more than $500,000, mostly from MIT graduate Alexander Morkos.

“The idea to give away bitcoin to a group of MIT students came from a course I taught with Chris Peterson and Ed Schiappa. We wanted to understand if MIT undergrads would use bitcoin. And if so, how exactly?

Rubin developed Tidbit with fellow students as part of the Node Knockout hackathon in November 2013. With its help, it was possible to mine bitcoin on a computer as a replacement for traditional advertising. Tidbit worked on the Proof-of-Concept algorithm and received the highest score for innovation at the hackathon.

However, local authorities soon learned about Rubin’s developments. In December 2013, the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office sent him a subpoena and demanded that he provide the Tidbit source code, information about the sites on which it was installed and the addresses of the wallets associated with it.

Some time later, the charges were dropped. But it was this incident that motivated Rubin to start the bitcoin experiment at MIT.

Who took part in the experiment.

The Bitcoin project started at the end of October 2014. To receive BTC, students had to fill out a questionnaire, read the study materials and create a crypto wallet. “At that time, it was quite difficult and could discourage the desire to participate,” Rubin said in an interview with BeInCrypto.

Despite technical difficulties, 70% of MIT undergraduate students, about 3,108 people, took part in the project. Each of them received $100 worth of BTC. The price of the asset at that time was about $336.

Once they received BTC, students could use it as they saw fit.

“One in ten cashed out in the first two weeks. By the end of the experiment in 2017, it was one in four. No one had the slightest idea whether bitcoin as a whole would function,” Christian Catalini, one of the researchers, told CNBC.

One of the participants in the experiment, Wang Fu, now a software engineer and co-founder of cryptocurrency broker Floating Point Group, told CNBC:

“One of the worst and one of the best things about MIT is a restaurant called Thelonious Monkfish. I spent a lot of cryptocurrencies to buy sushi.”

But there were also success stories. So, former MIT student Mary Spangers told Bloomberg in 2021 that she still holds the received BTC.