MIT Club Plans To Give Students $100 Worth Of Bitcoin To See What They Purchase

If virtual currency supporters were playing a game of poker, proponents of Bitcoin would have just raised the stakes on the champions of Dogecoin. What could possibly beat Dogecoin’s beautifully painted, Shiba Inu dog-pictured NASCAR, you ask? How about providing an entire undergrad population with a wallet full of bitcoin?

That’s right, next fall the entire 4,500 person undergrad population at MIT will start the school year with $100 worth of bitcoin in their virtual wallets, The Verge reports.

The MIT Bitcoin Club announced they have raised a half million dollars from alumni and the bitcoin community to fund the social experiment of sorts. The group will work with researchers on campus to study how students use the new currency. Additionally, they plan to provide students with financial information programs about bitcoin.

“Giving students access to cryptocurrencies is analogous to providing them with internet access at the dawn of the internet era,” one of the two students behind the project tells The Verge.

While the group doesn’t know how students will use their new-found fortune, it plans to persuade merchants around campus to begin accepting the virtual currency.

In case you’re not a student at MIT and simply don’t have a clue what bitcoin is, Consumerist created a handy guide to answer just about all of your burning bitcoin-related questions.

Now for the real question: if things go well with this little experiment will MIT start accepting tuition by bitcoin?

MIT club giving every undergrad $100 in bitcoin [The Verge]