The MIT Connection

Adsense is everywhere. A few days ago I was working on a different topic when Google served an ad for bitcoin. I followed it and received something about an MIT white paper. Going further required me to enter an email address and since the ad promised only an 'excerpt' of the document, I stopped there. Afterwards I started to wonder if I could locate the original document. Using the obvious search terms I discovered Enigma (enigma.media.mit.edu).

Enigma is a decentralized cloud platform with guaranteed privacy. Private data is stored, shared and analyzed without ever being fully revealed to any party. Secure multi-party computation, empowered by the blockchain, is the magical technology behind it. [...] Want to dive in the technical details? See our whitepaper!

Sounds interesting, but first I wanted to look into the MIT Media Lab, a group whose name pops up repeatedly in bitcoin discussions. More search terms led to The Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative.

The goal of the Media Lab Digital Currency initiative is to bring together global experts in areas ranging from cryptography, to economics, to privacy, to distributed systems, to take on this important new area of research.

Anything else of interest from MIT? There's the MIT Bitcoin Club (bitcoin.mit.edu; 'Come discover Bitcoin!').

We believe Bitcoin has the potential to be not just a digital currency, but the future of money. While it is still in the early stages, we see Bitcoin as a protocol or platform on which financial and non-financial transactions can be conducted and verified as part of a global public ledger. Bitcoin lies at the intersection of several important academic research areas, including cryptography, distributed computing, graph theory, finance, and economics. The MIT Bitcoin Club seeks to provide forums where Bitcoin-related ideas, projects, programs, events, and businesses can be studied, discussed, and developed. Through club activities, we seek to increase awareness and use of Bitcoin within and beyond the MIT community.

There are also several recent stories on MIT's $900k Bitcoin Developer Fund (28 March 2016; coindesk.com).

MIT announced today it has raised $900,000 to fund the work of three bitcoin developers. The Bitcoin Developer Fund, backed by venture capitalist Fred Wilson, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and others is intended to give the three bitcoin coders working to resolve the block-size debate and other similar technical challenges an academic platform from which to work.

These days $900K doesn't buy much development time ('the money will cover salaries, travel and support of bitcoin protocol development efforts'), but with bitcoin evolving so quickly, short time frames are probably best.