Topic: 8 Years ago today, $500,000 worth of bitcoin was distributed to MIT students. (Read 454 times)

This following link contains a more in-depth (and statistical) description of the experiment and its results at the time they were measured, bettering the content found on this other document, and written by the authors of the experiment themselves:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2822729

Just to highlight a couple of things:

-   The main goal of the experiment was to see what people did with their airdropped bitcoins after 2 weeks.

-   For contrasting purposes, they created to groups: the first group received their BTCs on day x, whilst the second group received it two weeks later.

-   They tracked cashing-out through the digital wallet provider (for those that did not resort to a custodial wallet – 29% used an open-source solution – presumably custodial).

-   They added other variables to study the groups from different perspectives (social network, attitude towards bitcoin, demographics, whether they were new to bitcoin (89% were) and so forth.

Essentially, nearly 10% cashed-out within two weeks after receiving their bitcoins, where the segment of so called early-adopters (see below) did so at higher rates (10,8% for those in the first group, 18,3% for those in the second).

There are some specifics I personally don’t like in the study. For example, the use of the label "early adopter" is given to those that signed-up earliest to the experiment (the first 25%). The assigned half of these early adopters to each of the two main groups (as said, group 2 received there bitcoins two weeks after group 1). Considering they had 5 days to sign-up for the experiment, it seems to me like an overkill tag. They are early birds, but not early adopters.

Additionally, the document talks about studying how students rejected (or accepted bitcoin), associating rejection to selling bitcoin for USD. That is by far a wrong concept, or at least, choice of words, even likely so back in 2014 when the experiment took place.

I haven’t taken a look at the data in detail, but the second group of early adopters likely cashed-out significantly more in numbers due to the influence of those in the first group and/or variation of price in between cashing-out windows of the two groups (I haven’t contrasted this hypothesis though).

That's probably the right thing to do anyway. Everyone knows the ATH of bitcoin and would not sell it at this price.
But even if those MIT students were holding BTC until know they are already having lots of gains and it won't harm them to sell it at this price.
A trader should never regret once he has sold in profit. Besides that these students had got it as a reward and so they can sell it at any price given that they had still hold on to it.

Yes.. I totally agree with what you just said, because considering the economy of most countries, people won't think twice to convert a free distributed bitcoin to fiat currency instantly dor purchase of foods and other stuff needed for survival, because in this case, it can only take someone who believed in the Bitcoin movement to had held it till this moment, whoch eventually would have been rewarded with a massage return of investment after this 8yrs. So statements like this is equally normal, as in the next 8yrs from now, some persons will still also be regreting and wished they had invested today too

Looking at the cost of btc then, it was  cheaper than it is now so therefore the not could afford it as it is a reputable organization. I believe this step taken was to onboard their students into blockchain which was the major goal which was successfully achieved and completed and it was also in Record as the first organization to have carried out such give away. This helps a long way because thousands of students were gifted Bitcoin which however aided the fast and wide spread of the awareness of Bitcoin globally. I believe these sets of students who got this give away must have onboarded new sets of people  into the system. And it also aided in the fast circulation of Bitcoin.
The issue of tracking wallet would likely be near impossible because some of the students might have sold out while receiving and some might have bought more as well while others might decide not to do anything at the initial instance so tell me how do you know who the wallet addresses of the students and do not forget that there are other wallets likely holding same amount of Bitcoin outside the ones distributed to the students. This is the reality so you need do proper research before coming for argument.

The experiment is well described in the following article on MIT’s website, though from a July 2017’s perspective in interpreting the aftermaths of the experiment (meaning that it is not followed through to today):

https://news.mit.edu/2017/bitcoin-study-period-exclusivity-encourages-early-adopters-0713

The discrepancy in the number of participants between articles is due to the interpretation of what each number represents: Whilst the 5.000 number (4.494 really) represents the number of students that were offered to participate, only a subset of them, 3.100, actually enrolled in the experiment.

Btc isn't really cheap now. Will it mean it's more valuable now to hodl than to gave it away? It's sad but this is the mindset of the people. They will only value things once they know that they can benefit out of it. It is said that the students are given an option to spend their coins so they spend it right away. If not then some will likely sell it during the pump but if there are students who manage to keep their btc up until now, I don't think their reaction is happy because this year is a dump year. They will regret and think they should have sold their btc last year although there is still a chance for the bull to return so maybe they will wait once more.

I like the position of the adverb "totally" in the topic you created and they are other shorter formats like "incredible! 5000 MIT students received $100 each in 2014" Starting the sentence with the adjective "incredible" explains how wonderful the project was in 2014 and how interesting it'll be to recent readers of the article who wants to dig further about the distribution of 100 dollars to 5000 students. Definitely, they'll discover that not all 5000 students claimed their airdrop.

I remember this article about a university in America where the students received some bitcoins which can be amazing for a time like today and a price like what we see right now but unfortunately as far as I know mostly the students sold the bitcoins while they could hold and get more benefits over it

World's top universities are often places of innovation and where new things can kick off. It's an impressive research, and $100 worth of BTC for thousands is very impressive. I wanted to learn more, so I read the article, but I was surprised to see that it's unknown how many of the participants sold their coins. I thought that research was supposed to track that sort of stuff. Also, only 14% still using BTC is quite a sad number. I remember how El Salvador was claimed to have failed in adoption because out of those who got their $30 worth of BTC, a small percentage used their wallets after using up this money. It feels like, as an adoption experiment, the MIT case also shows some failure.

Yes ofcourse, considering bitcoin was so cheap and so new back then, it made sense to distribute it among the students.
I wonder if any of those students still hold their coins they would be so happy right now.
I guess what MIT did back then was an important step for bitcoin and it did created an impact in starting the widespread adoption.

That’s amazing how they did it back then and taught those student this is new recipe worth trying out and definitely most of them turned into hodlers for sure. I am wondering if any of those students are present on the forum or not because there is pretty high chance someone must be from that group on the forum for obvious reason of bitcoin and blockchain tech discussion.

This was good move by MIT group. Wish we had more such news coming out from various technological institutions and also from financial institute. Like giving some practical approach for using the bitcoin. :-)

How about this one like I used "In 2014, totally $500,000 was distributed to MIT students, $100 each"?

People don't have to know exact date in 2014 when that distribution was made. If they are interested in and spend time to read the sourced article, they will find the date.

Not all students get it. Only eligible students and if they claimed it.

Yes, the shorter the better and the more attractive the better. If you want to make an attractive and shocking title to catch readers, you can use misleading words intentionally.

I would never have thought that you registered on the forum before me, although I followed the forum as a guest sometime in the middle of 2014, and I registered only a year later. It was still a time of extremely high doubts about whether Bitcoin has a future or not, whether it will ever be worth $1000 again or is just a "mirage" as the famous The Oracle of Omaha said at the time.

If we are honest, at that time free Bitcoin was much more realistic than today in the sense that you could literally earn some through faucets - These were not large amounts in fiat ($2-3), but with a price of around $200/250 per BTC and with a little help from referrals, you could collect 1 BTC within a reasonable time. What I want to tell you is that most people did not consider Bitcoin to have a greater value than what was then expressed in fiat, and that's how they treated it.

In the past it was easy to distribute bitcoin or say as a rewarding system like there was faucet site giving away 5 btc to the users but if we seek the same thing now for mass adoption then it's impossible depending on the price level of $19k and suppose if you want to distribute it then how much you have to spend in total? So in the past it was fine but you can opt for various other ways if you are interested in mass adoption of bitcoin.

The better title you suggest I should put there is too long to enter the space provided for title in this forum. However, the article stated that each student got $100. Title even on newspapers is made in a short form to attract people to read the article. Titles like this; Mother of 4 dies of pleasure" many people will go through the article and realize that what happened is different from the topic.

Corrected it, I suspect that my grammar corrector (Quillbot) opted it out in the process of simplifying the sentence without noticing. Apart from your reply, I didn't notice anyone else claiming it. Anyway, the truth is that you're right, 2014-2016 was a pretty uninteresting era for Bitcoin, and it's quite ironic because I signed up here in 2014, but I was nowhere to be seen in less than a year. Thus, it's hypocritical for me to call these students out, because I myself have lost interest in Bitcoin. I wasn't given a free airdrop, though, but chances are that I'd do the same.

You obviously didn't read all the posts (and there aren't many of them), so you would have seen that I mentioned exactly that part that talks about 14% active after 2 years. But what did you expect in the period 2014-2016 when Bitcoin was still quite uninteresting for the majority? Students do not necessarily have to be people who can be expected to have a high level of understanding of some new technologies such as Bitcoin...

What startled me is that (almost) no one has already mentioned the extremely poor "conversion rates" of this experiment. From what I understood, according to the article, another experiment was conducted two years later in order to see how many students who took part in the bitcoin give away were still using bitcoin. Unfortunately, only 14% claimed to actively use Bitcoin. Isn't that a tiny percentage for students studying in such an advanced technological institute?

Thus, it's pretty safe to conclude that giving away free money isn't the key to Bitcoin's mass adoption. Most will simply convert it to fiat and cash out the money, which is quite a common option according to the article, as students claimed that it was "free money" and not an alternative way of holding value and conducting transactions.

Imagine it reaching 6-figures in price, how are those few bucks transactions are gonna be processed with those rising fees I wonder.

Then there are always altcoins for that.

Not all of students who claimed Bitcoin in that event were able to hold it more than 3 or 4 years. They very likely missed the bull run in 2017 and they mostly sold their Bitcoin to get $100 back and used it for personal demand.

I think you should edit the topic title because $500,000 is a big figure and readers can think each receiver received $500,000 in Bitcoin (2014) or received an amount of Bitcoin that worth $500,000 at 2022 price.

A better topic title is like:

• "8 years ago today, totally $500,000 was distributed to MIT students, $100 for each

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/29/mit-student-bitcoin-wall-street-donor

I know. But it could be that people who gave out free BTC to a large number of people in this way were miners back in the days and they didn't have to raise the huge sum of money in fiat first, but had easily mined the BTC themselves a lot earlier and gave them out to people when the chance came to do so. It isn't even only about the current price, people now see BTC as having a lot of potential to rise to unthikable prices, so surely it is harder to give out free BTC today than before.

$500,000 was a lot of money in 2014 too, and it doesn't matter how much that's worth in Bitcoin. If you'd raise the same amount today, you can still give $100 to 5000 people. They'll just get 0.005BTC each instead of 0.29BTC, but the purchasing power is about the same.

BTC is more expensive than it was in 2014 and it is surely harder for people to give out free BTC because of that, but it does not mean that people aren't doing it, but not just to over 4528 people, which is a lot by the way.

Free distribution of BTC was great for the network many years ago, and still is, it helped more people to have and use BTC and is a contributing factor to the growth in BTC you see today. Here is one event of BTC being given out in the past, which was of great help to the network. People who give out BTC are not concerned about what will happen to centralized exchanges (which in itself wasn't originally part of the network), but for more people to get to use BTC and take the network closer to mass adoption.

One number is obviously wrong, although it is not too important how many students received $100 worth of BTC, but how many of them then realized what they actually received. The data from the article, which by the way is from 2021, says that after two years a survey was conducted in which it is stated that 14% of those who received free BTC were still actively using it. We can't say that any of those students are more or less smart because they spent Bitcoin or kept it, because as one of the students who is from the whole story says :


The most important thing is that Bitcoin has helped some in their studies, and it has obviously interested some to be active in Bitcoin today. In my opinion, the experiment was successful.

Good results for those students who have hold bitcoin all these years. $100 then is ~$5,800 now or ~$20,000 at last peak price. It's not millions, but still, good bonuses. As you can see from the article, there were few of them. Mostly, many took it as a joke, and also, then few people saw the potential in bitcoin. But of course, this event in its own way influenced the crypto industry as a whole. After all, people bought something for btc, even those books in the library or food, when bitcoin went up in price 3 times, as described in the article. In any case, commodity-money transactions for btc took place and it is for these purposes that bitcoin should be used.

It may not be so efficient. If free bitcoins are still distributed to people, More than 40% of these persons will quickly convert to fiat to spend it without considering to HODL. Things that are easily and freely gotten are usually not valued so much that is why you will still have some people squander it all immediately instead of hodling. When free things are given, you also need to tell the people the reason and the value of the what they have received so that they can be encouraged to Hodl.

Free distribution of bitcoins? Nah, that’s really bad idea. How much you think can be free dropped just like MIT event because in the current era the bitcoin is highly costly and highly in demand. If someone even host event like that then there will be rat race to acquire those free bitcoins and if it’s a mega airdrop then dam we gonna loose the demand from exchanges and p2p transaction and it could cause nice dump to bitcoins trading chart. I’m pretty sure we should not be doing that again.

Read both articles. One thing is puzzling me. What were the exact number or students. One article is showing 4500+ student.


And if we go to the next article it is showing the 3100 students.

This a big difference. Almost 1400+.

By the way congrats to those who hold it.
Now one wallet has almost $6000+ if they hold.

If my guess is correct, this is a kind of practice-based survey. Only with a centralized application can all spent bitcoins be known, of course for IT schools it is not difficult to build an application like this. In conclusion, the transaction does not occur on-chain because it is not intended for the technical development of bitcoin. cmiiw

I don't think they is a means of tracking the addresses of participants as the link to the survey is down. And its possible that those who held bought more bitcoin making it impossible to see an address with the exact balance. Moreover, how does your site operate? is it possible to go far back to 2014 transactions? or it searches generally on all addresses with a particular amount you want to check?


[/quote]
They had the fireflies application that enabled them to crowd source goods and services for bitcoin. But on the other article it was stated that some stores in the school stopped accepting bitcoin. However, as at 2014 bitcoin was getting more adoptions unlike the 2010 - 2011 era. I think for the school library to accept bitcoin then they'll be other means of spending bitcoin in the campus as bitcoin won't be a new term to them. Remember, MIT is a tech school and their students are IT geeks. They all spent their bitcoin, only few held even the fireflies programmer stated that he got his degree that's what matters when he was asked why he didn't hodl.

There's not a single Bitcoin address that holds that exact amount:
I'm curious to see the list of addresses involved. My guess is it was a different amount, or someone spammed all involved addresses with dust. It's unlikely all of those 4528 addresses were emptied.

The most widespread airdrop I think. And lucky if some of those students held up to last year's ATH, they could buy more goods or services.
Just wondering how the distribution of bitcoin was at that time, because considering the article said bitcoin could only be spent on things related to education.

According to that article cited above, the $100 worth of Bitcoin gathered around 13,000% ROI so far meaning that if one just hold the said coin then the holder has now $13,000 in his/her account. In case, some recipient's just forgot about it (of course, not forgetting the keys) and never used the said amount to buy anything then certainly it would be a big surprise. Now, am just wondering if we can categorize this story as a big success or just another ho-hum as we are searching for real and visible mainstream adoption for Bitcoin...

Congrats to the hodlers, showing once again why you should be in this for the long haul; although, there is nothing wrong with showing utility, meeting a need(s), or pushing for mass adoption.

 image from Pete Rizzo

In 2014 two students of MIT Dan Elitzer the founder of MIT bitcoin club and Jeremy Rubin a computer science student launched a project aimed at making bitcoin a case study by students and professors to birth an ecosystem for digital currency in MIT. To begin the project the founder of MIT bitcoin club coupled with Jeremy Rubin was curious to know how students will spend bitcoin if given the chance to hold bitcoin. So they raised more than 500k with the assistance of the bitcoin community and MIT alumni which was enough to distribute 100 dollar worth of bitcoin (0.290272 BTC) each to 4,528 enrolled in the institution. This free bitcoin distribution made MIT campus the first place in the world to have widespread access to bitcoin.

On the 29th of October 2014, a survey that lasted for 5 days was hosted by the MIT Bitcoin club to enable students to claim their bitcoins. Students who received the free bitcoin had the option to spend it on books at the school library where bitcoin was accepted. And on Fireflies a program that enabled MIT students to crowdsource products and services for bitcoin.

A link below shows how students spent their money and the few who held the free bitcoin.

https://news.bitcoin.com/thousands-mit-students-free-bitcoin-2014-6-year-holders-13000-gains/


Giving-away free bitcoin to thousands of people is the best vehicle to Mass adoption.

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2014/10/29/mit-undergrads-can-now-claim-their-free-100-in-bitcoin/