-
@ 000290e1:b4909c87
2025-04-06 03:12:01Back in 2014, Jeremy Rubin, a sophomore at MIT studying computer science and electrical engineering, had a bold idea: give every undergraduate student $100 worth of bitcoin.
Seven months later, armed with $500,000 in donations from alumni and crypto enthusiasts, Rubin made it happen. A total of 3,108 students took him up on the offer — at a time when bitcoin was trading at around $336.
Had everyone held onto their bitcoin, the collective value of the “MIT Airdrop” would have reached approximately $44.1 million at today’s prices. But not everyone HODLed.
According to researchers including Christian Catalini — now co-creator of the Diem stablecoin project once initiated by Facebook — about 1 in 10 students cashed out within two weeks. By the time the experiment ended in 2017, 1 in 4 had sold their crypto. After that, the team stopped tracking the cohort’s transactions.
Some students spent their bitcoin in more... flavorful ways.
Van Phu, now a software engineer and co-founder of crypto brokerage Floating Point Group, regrets blowing his bitcoin on sushi.
“One of the worst and best things at MIT was this restaurant called Thelonious Monkfish,” said Phu. “I spent a lot of my crypto buying sushi.”
He wasn’t alone.
Quantitative trader Sam Trabucco, also part of the experiment, estimated that half the students he knew spent their bitcoin at the same restaurant — the only place in Cambridge accepting bitcoin at the time. The spot has since rebranded and stopped accepting crypto.
The Birth of the Experiment
Rubin got the idea for the bitcoin giveaway in the middle of a legal battle with the New Jersey attorney general, who had accused him of being a “hardcore cybercriminal.” The claim stemmed from Rubin’s creation of Tidbit, a bitcoin mining program that had recently won an innovation award at a hackathon.
Though the case was eventually dropped and Rubin cleared, the experience highlighted how little even his MIT peers knew about bitcoin.
“I thought, ‘This is MIT — everyone’s supposed to be super cutting-edge.’ But bitcoin just wasn’t widely understood,” Rubin recalled.
Determined to change that, Rubin partnered with Dan Elitzer, then an MBA student at MIT Sloan. In October 2014, they launched the experiment. Students had to complete a short series of questionnaires and review educational materials before claiming their $100 in bitcoin.
And with that, the great MIT Bitcoin Experiment was born — part tech education, part economic study, and part sushi-fueled cautionary tale.