A bunch of MIT students got $100 of free bitcoin in 2014 some got rich, some wasted it on sushi

A bunch of MIT students got $100 of free bitcoin in 2014 some got rich, some wasted it on sushi

Jeremy Rubin was a sophomore studying computer science and electrical engineering when he decided that he wanted to give every undergraduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology $100 worth of bitcoin. Seven months later – armed with half a million dollars in donations from alumni and bitcoin enthusiasts – Rubin offered to do just that. 3,108 undergrads took him up on it. This was back when the world's most popular cryptocurrency wasn't quite so popular, trading at around $336. Had all recipients of this free bitcoin let their crypto wallets sit idle, the "MIT Airdrop" collective would have been $44.1 million richer by today's prices. But some students didn't hold on. Researchers tracing the project, including Christian Catalini, now co-creator of the initiated by , say that one in ten cashed out in the first two weeks. By the end of the experiment in 2017, one in four had cashed out. The experiment creators stopped tracking transactions among the cohort after that. Van Phu, now a software engineer and co-founder of crypto broker Floating Point Group, is still kicking himself for spending a lot of his bitcoin on sushi. "One of the worst things and one of the best