Bitcoin for Undergrads, Wall Street’s Next Pump-and-Dump

Corey Pein, May 5, 2014

The story was everywhere last week: MIT undergraduates will each receive $100 in Bitcoin when they arrive on campus next fall. The gift comes thanks to an affluent donor and two precocious student entrepreneurs — one a sophomore computer science major, the other a first-year Sloan MBA student and president of the MIT Bitcoin Club.

I exaggerate slightly when I say the story was everywhere. As far as I know, Foreign Affairs hasn’t yet picked it up. But the Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, USA Today, Time, Vice, The Wire, Slate, the Guardian, the Independent, the Telegraph, the Christian Science Monitor, the Jewish Daily Forward, RT, public radio’s Marketplace, Reuters, and Bloomberg all did run with it, along with basically every tech blog (and there are way too many tech blogs).