> the black market on campus will (surely) start accepting it
This made me guffaw. The black market on campus? Would that be the Hob where Katniss Everdeen sells her poached turkeys while the corrupt Capitol police look away? Are Jay and Silent Bob behind the campus bookstore selling blunts, stolen books and test answers? Is there a darknet on campus accessible only to Angelina Jolie style hackers? Maybe you meant some kind of informal marketplace on campus where people buy and sell drugs and stolen merchandise but I don't think such a place exists on MIT. It's mostly hard working students trying to make it through school. I think you've been watching too many movies.
Edit: I'm totally ok with this comment being downvoted, I would have downvoted it myself, but I couldn't resist.
Uh, you do realize that "the black market" is a term for underground exchange, right? Not a literal location.
As with any college campus, MIT surely has a healthy black market (buyers and sellers of alcohol, drugs, and various other illegal goods & services). With every student having Bitcoin, some will surely try to use it on said market.
Or perhaps you also thought the stock market was a building in downtown Manhattan...
So MIT alumni selling drugs, will accept illegal transactions which are displayed on a virtual leather board where everyone has access and can never be erased?
I would expect MIT students to be smarter than that. Not to mention that most students will prefer to pay in USD than BTC.
ps. Bitcoin as a form of payment, has a really questionable success. If a virtual currency is going to be accepted by the public, will have to be state-backed in some way. So bitcoin as a currency, might be (extremely) interesting, but I'm sure 100% it will never be able to replace FIAT in it's current form.
A virtual ledger board that, with a small amount of effort, contains no information about the physical person who controls a wallet. Of course, MIT could implement the Bitcoin handout in such a way they they know the initial recipient of each wallet.
Yes it's probably a tiny minority who buy it through off campus drug dealers and friends. Such as there are drug dealing trends, they will happen across MA, New England and the general area and will happen regardless of bitcoin experiments at MIT. I'm rolling my eyes at this notion of a single purpose black market, hidden in the depths of the halls of MIT, the ire of faculty and administrators alike. It's such a silly idea. Might make a great young adult novel plot though.
This made me guffaw. The black market on campus? Would that be the Hob where Katniss Everdeen sells her poached turkeys while the corrupt Capitol police look away? Are Jay and Silent Bob behind the campus bookstore selling blunts, stolen books and test answers? Is there a darknet on campus accessible only to Angelina Jolie style hackers? Maybe you meant some kind of informal marketplace on campus where people buy and sell drugs and stolen merchandise but I don't think such a place exists on MIT. It's mostly hard working students trying to make it through school. I think you've been watching too many movies.
Edit: I'm totally ok with this comment being downvoted, I would have downvoted it myself, but I couldn't resist.