- Two MIT students have raised half a million dollars for a project to distribute $100 in bitcoin to every undergraduate student at MIT this fall.
Does anybody wonder if this money couldn't have gone to a better cause? I'd wager most MIT student's come from wealthy families or are extremely gifted.. why not give a hand-up to someone in need than give someone without need a handout? Instead of the intellectually gifted and fortunate, maybe give to families of children with special needs who are on the other side of the fortune continuum.
While I do agree with the spirit of your argument, I also think that this argument in general is pretty subjective and can be applied to just about any sort of spending that doesn't have an underlying moral purpose. Who knows, maybe something good will come out of this, like Sean's Outpost came out of the Bitcoin community at large?
Right, it's kind of like a charitable crapshoot. It could just go to video games or drugs. Why not give the money to someone you know for a fact can put it to good use? People didn't just randomly give to a group of people to create Sean's Outpost. They gave their bitcoin to a person who stated he would feed the homeless with it.
This will be an interesting experiment. I do wonder how anonymous they'll keep it, (e.g, if they'll be tying the coins to student names/IDs). Will be cool to see how the coins propogate through a small ecosystem. Or maybe everyone will just spend it on some deep-web-acquired adderall and Alpaca socks.