Bitcoin may really take off in the ecosystem of college campuses. Two MIT students raised a half-million dollars and used the proceeds to give $100 worth of bitcoin to approximately 5,000 undergraduates on the Cambridge campus. The intention of the donors was to give students the opportunity to “learn, build, and experiment with the capabilities of cryptocurrency”. Coinbase, the digital wallet service that I use, was inspired by the MIT project and to leverage the  idea and directly support bitcoin awareness among college students. Their concept is pretty simple. Any student on opens a new Coinbase account gets a gift of $10 worth of bitcoin. Any student who refers another student who opens an account gets $1 for each person referred. We started this giveaway a few days ago, and it’s already off to a great start. The program has taken off. Here is a breakdown by campus as of a few days ago:

Seems a bit strange that MIT is near the bottom of the list, but 1,700 new accounts in total in just a few days is impressive. However, the measure of success will not be the number of accounts, but rather the number of new and creative ways for the use of bitcoin. I expect to see many new threats to PayPal, Mastercard, VISA, and numerous financial services around the world.