Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy

learning network” for notes sharing,

book sharing (solving the problem that a

certain book is checked out until the end

of the term), finding team members,

forming study groups, studying for tests,

and providing other kinds of support.

Fifth, there could be a RealJobs module

connecting local employers with

students for topical internships and jobs

with industry exposure and job force

readiness training, all in a rewards-

structured environment.

There are several efforts under way to

support students learning about and using

cryptocurrencies on university

campuses. The student-founded Campus

Cryptocurrency Network counts 150

clubs in its network as of September

2014 and is a primary resource for

students interested in starting campus

cryptocurrency clubs. In the future, this

network could be the standard repository

for templated Campuscoin applications.

Likewise, students founded and operate

the Bitcoin Association of Berkeley and

organized their first hackathon in

November 2014. MIT, with the MIT

Bitcoin Project, has made a significant

commitment to encourage the use and

awareness of cryptocurrency among

students, and it plans to give half a

million dollars’ worth of Bitcoin to

undergraduates. Students were invited to

claim their $100 of Bitcoin per person in

October 2014.169 Stanford University has

made an effort to develop cryptography

courses, which it offers for free online.

Coin Drops as a Strategy for

Public Adoption

The MIT Bitcoin Project is effectively a

coin drop, the simultaneous distribution

of Bitcoin to entire populations to spur

mainstream learning, trust, and adoption.

A similar but larger-scale coin drop, the

BitDrop, is scheduled for the Caribbean

island nation of Dominica for March 14,

2015, as part of the Pi Day mathematical

festival. Bitcoin will be sent by SMS via

Coinapult to all 70,000 residents. 170 The

goal is to create the world’s largest and

highest density Bitcoin community. The

project began as a brainstorming

exercise to facilitate adoption and put

Bitcoin into the hands of as many people

as possible. Dominica was chosen as

optimal because the country has a

relatively small population, a high

cellular telephony penetration rate, and a

position as a regional education center,

and it is the center of an active

intraisland, intracurrency trade and

remittance economy. Bitcoin ATMs and

merchant point-of-sale (POS) systems

are to be installed as part of the project

to help foster ongoing use of Bitcoin

after the coin drop.

Coin drops or airdrops have been used

in other situations; for example,

“Nationcoin” has been used to shore up

national identity. Iceland targeted

residents with free cryptocurrency in the

Auroracoin project, and similar efforts

include Scotcoin, Spaincoin, and

Greececoin, although there does not

appear to have been a high degree of

ongoing activity with these Nationcoin

cryptocurrencies. 171 One reason that

Ecuador banned Bitcoin was because it

plans to launch its own national

cryptocurrency.172 Nationcoin could help

bolster a sentiment of national

patrimony, especially as many Eurozone

nations have suffered from European

Central Bank regulation impositions as a

result of participating in the Euro. The

same kind of Nationcoin benefits could

be available in the idea of Tribecoin as

the patrimony-supporting coin issuance

of native peoples. The Pine Ridge Indian

Reservation in South Dakota was the

first American Indian tribe to launch its

own cryptocurrency, MazaCoin, using

the tribal nation’s sovereignty to set its

own rules on cryptocurrencies. 173

Currency: New Meanings

The key point is that the term currency

could begin to mean different things in

the cryptoeconomy context, especially

much more than in the basic money sense

of serving as a payment mechanism for

goods and services. A second important

sense of the word currency in the

cryptoeconomy context is emerging as

“something of value that can be usefully

deployed in some situation,” or, as

described previously, “a unit of value

that can be earned and used in a certain

economic system.” There is the general

idea of a token, currency, or appcoin

allowing access to certain features of an

economic system. Having Bitcoin, for

example, allows access to performing

transactions on the blockchain.

Privileges are accorded to users in some

cases just by their holding Bitcoin, as

this confirms ownership, and in other

cases by their actually spending the

Bitcoin. Considering currency more

broadly in these ways starts to widen its

applicability to many other situations. A

currency is a token of value that can be

earned and deployed. A currency stores

value and is transmissible. This

generalized definition supports the claim

that there can be many nonmonetary

currencies that are conceived in the

same structure. For example, reputation

is a unit of value that can be earned and

deployed in certain situations; it is a

nonmonetary currency in the sense that it

is a proxy for status or some kinds of

tasks that a person can do. Likewise,

health is a commodity of value that may

be earned and can be deployed in