Best known for the bold research projects of its students, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will soon see its 4,528 undergraduate students acquire $100 dollars in Bitcoin. The project, proposed by students Jeremy Rubin and Dan Elitzer, aims to create a true ecosystem for virtual currency at the prestigious institution. The mission is to study the emerging social ecosystem and economy as activities and circumstances arise to allow the exchange of bitcoins between students, staff, faculty, and the outside world.

To make this happen, the sponsors have managed to raise $500,000 from former MIT alumni and staff as well as the Bitcoin community. The distribution of bitcoins is planned for next fall on campus.

Rubin and Elitzer want to find out what happens when people in everyday life suddenly have access to a cryptocurrency. The MIT Bitcoin Project also involves a range of activities, including working with professors and researchers across the Institute to study how students use the bitcoin they receive, as well as spurring academic and entrepreneurial activity within the university in this burgeoning field.

“Giving students access to cryptocurrencies is analogous to providing them with Internet access at the dawn of the Internet era,” said Rubin. “When the distribution happens this fall, it will make the MIT campus the first place in the world where it will be possible to assume widespread access to Bitcoin.”

Creating Bitcoin ecosystem

Why announce the project now, just ahead of summer vacation? According to Bitcoin Club president Dan Elitzer, it’s to give MIT students plenty of time to come up with cool Bitcoin-powered ideas and create a bitcoin ecosystem. “When you step onto campus this fall, all of your classmates are going to have access to Bitcoin;” Elitzer said, adding “what are YOU going to build to give them interesting ways to use it?”

To make this happen, the project originators will also observe the spread of the currency, the cash flow and the resulting modified on ownership and exchange effects. As Bitcoin is a psudeonymous exchange system, it would be possible for researchers to track bitcoin movement between addresses and use self-reporting from students and faculty to fill in information on unknown addresses allowing for an extremely accurate image of trading.

Thomas Hardjono, Executive Director of the MIT Kerberos & Internet Trust Consortium, believes this project give an opportunity to get people to think how Bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies educate merchants around campus and how data can be used.

“Bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies pave the way for personal data to be recognized as a new digital asset class. The MIT Bitcoin Project is a truly exciting venture that will provide the foundation for research into other classes of digital assets,” said Hardjono.

It will be interesting to see what MIT students do with the coin in one of the foremost institutions for technological advancement. Potential uses that come to mind include: cracking the code for vulnerabilities, developing a better Bitcoin, more hacking initiatives, new mining technologies or big returns in bitcoin trading.

With this project, the Bitcoin Club hopes to set MIT as the premier university for Bitcoin research and innovation.