In 2014, Selected MIT Students Got $100 Of Free BTC. What Did They Do With It?
18 August 2021 - 8:18PM
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This fascinating experiment involving free BTC generated concrete
results and we’re here to review them. The feel-good story arrives
courtesy of CNBC, who interviewed some of the protagonists and got
to the bottom of things. It all started with 19-years-old Jeremy
Rubin, who developed a program called Tidbit. It allowed
“users to mine for Bitcoins on a client’s computer as a replacement
for traditional advertising.” The authorities weren’t so keen on
his idea, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation remembers: In
December 2013, the New Jersey Attorney General’s office issued a
sweeping subpoena to Rubin and Tidbit, seeking Tidbit’s source
code, documents and narrative responses about how Tidbit worked,
which websites it was installed on and the Bitcoin accounts and
wallet addresses associated with Tidbit. Related Reading | MIT BTC
Project Goes Live, Offer $100 of Free BTC to Undergrads at MIT They
eventually dropped the investigation, but one good thing came out
of it. He realized that even though he thought “everyone was super
cutting-edge” at MIT, not many were familiar with Bitcoin. So,
logically, he raised “half a million dollars in donations from
alumni and bitcoin enthusiasts” and the free BTC experiment was
born. Were There Conditions To Get The Free BTC? The idea was
for undergrad students to “complete a few questionnaires and review
educational materials,” and to “set up their own crypto wallet,
which at the time was hard enough to discourage participation.”
Still, 3,108 students got $100 of free BTC. At the time, Bitcoin’s
price was $336, so they got about 0,3 BTC each. At today’s price,
that would be worth about $13.500. “We wanted to get bitcoin
out in the world more, and we wanted to spread the technology,”
said Rubin. “We also wanted to study what it means to distribute a
new asset.” How Many Sold Or Spent The BTC? Luckily for the history
books, researchers traced the project. Apparently, “1 in 10 cashed
out in the first two weeks. By the end of the experiment in 2017, 1
in 4 had cashed out.” Paper hands, sure, but remember that no one
had any idea if Bitcoin as a whole was going to pan out. CNBC
quotes Christian Catalini, one of the researchers: “Even at the
time, the technology was quite user unfriendly,” he said. “Even
within a pretty tech-savvy community such as MIT, it was kind of
surprising to see how much work it really was to use bitcoin at the
time.” Still, 3 out of every 4 held on to the BTC, which is pretty
impressive. “What was fascinating is that in a sense, the MIT
students got it right. The vast majority held on to their bitcoin
as an investment.” Did they, though? Or was it so difficult to use
and unknown by vendors that they didn’t even bother? BTC
price chart for 08/18/2021 on Bitstamp | Source: BTC/USD on
TradingView.com What Did The Students Do With Their Free BTC? Well,
long story short, they spent the free BTC on sushi. CNBC managed to
track two of those students that, somewhat ironically, now work in
the crypto space. One, Sam Trabucco, serves as Co-CEO of Sam
Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research. The other, “Van Phu, now a
software engineer and co-founder of crypto broker Floating Point
Group.” “One of the worst things and one of the best things
at MIT is this restaurant called Thelonious Monkfish,” said Phu. “I
spent a lot of my crypto buying sushi.” Related Reading | Uniswap
Labs Limits Access To Certain Tokens, What It Could Mean For The
DeFi Sector So did Trabucco, who remembers the experiment as an
important experience for the people involved. He spent the free BTC
because he “didn’t really think it was going to be the future of
finance.” Still, he considers that maybe already having a Bitcoin
wallet set up might’ve sent him on the path to head a firm as big
as Alameda Research. All’s well that ends well. Featured Image by
Yuhan Du on Unsplash - Charts by TradingView
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