🎓 In 2014, MIT distributed nearly 900 Bitcoin for free to over 3,000 students… an experiment that would be worth tens of millions of dollars today.

The idea was born in the minds of two students, Jeremy Rubin and Dan Elitzer, who wanted to understand how an entire population would react if they suddenly received a new form of money.
At the time, Bitcoin was worth about $336 and was still associated in the public’s mind with Silk Road, hacking, and criminal activities.
Despite this, more than 70% of MIT undergraduates participated in the experiment.
Each received the equivalent of $100 in Bitcoin after creating their own wallet and completing an educational course.
In total, over $310,000 was distributed, roughly 900 BTC.
The result is fascinating; many students weren’t really interested in Bitcoin, but in free money.
Some were even willing to give up half of their BTC to other students just to have a wallet created for them... Then the market crashed a few weeks after the distribution... the value of bitcoins plummeted, and many participants sold their BTC out of fear of losing more.
Looking back, each of these wallets contained about 0.29 BTC. At current prices, that would be worth several thousand dollars per student for those who kept their funds.
The experiment also helped understand how much the adoption of a new technology depends on the behavior of early users.
Researchers intentionally delayed the distribution for some students to observe the differences, and they found that when early users lost confidence or abandoned Bitcoin, newcomers were much less inclined to get interested.
Even though the experiment didn’t trigger widespread adoption on campus, it influenced an entire generation of students who later joined the crypto industry.
Ten years later, it remains one of the most famous academic experiments ever conducted around Bitcoin.