A bunch of MIT students got $100 of free bitcoin in 2014 – some got rich, some wasted it on sushi

Published

4 years ago

August 14, 2021

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Dan Elitzer and Jeremy Rubin rolled out the “MIT Bitcoin Project” in 2014.

Christopher A. Maynor

Jeremy Rubin was a sophomore studying computer science and electrical engineering when he decided that he wanted to give every undergraduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology $100 worth of bitcoin.

Seven months later – armed with half a million dollars in donations from alumni and bitcoin enthusiasts – Rubin offered to do just that, and 3,108 undergrads took him up on it.

This was back when the world’s most popular cryptocurrency wasn’t quite so popular, trading at around $336. Had all recipients of this free bitcoin let their crypto wallets sit idle, the “MIT Airdrop” collective would have been $44.1 million richer by today’s prices.

But some students didn’t hold on.

Researchers tracing the project, including Christian Catalini, now co-creator of the Diem stablecoin project initiated by Facebook, say that 1 in 10 cashed out in the first two weeks. By the end of the experiment in 2017, 1 in 4 had cashed out. The experiment creators stopped tracking transactions among the cohort after that.

Van Phu, now a software engineer and co-founder of crypto broker Floating Point Group, is still kicking himself for spending a lot of his bitcoin on sushi.

“One of the worst things and one of the best things at MIT is this restaurant called Thelonious Monkfish,” said Phu. “I spent a lot of my crypto buying sushi.”

Phu wasn’t alone in hemorrhaging his virtual coins at this campus dining hotspot.

Quantitative trader Sam Trabucco, who also took part in the experiment, estimated that half the people he knew spent their crypto spoils on fish.

“It was the only restaurant in Cambridge that was accepting bitcoin at the time, and it was a pretty popular spot,” he said. The restaurant has since changed its name and retired its bitcoin payment policy.

The MIT experiment

Rubin was halfway through a protracted legal battle with the New Jersey attorney general when he first got the idea for the bitcoin giveaway.

Unlike most 19-year-olds, Rubin was venting to his friends about the fact that state officials had accused him of being a “hardcore, hardened cyber criminal” who was “installing malware on people’s computers.” But Rubin says he had simply launched a bitcoin mining program called Tidbit. The project had just won an innovation award at a local hackathon known as Node Knockout, and Rubin, now CEO of bitcoin R&D lab Judica, was proud of what he had built.

The episode ended up with Rubin being cleared, but as it was happening, he kept noticing the blank stares from his friends each time he mentioned the word “bitcoin.”

“I thought, ‘This is MIT. I thought everyone was super cutting-edge.’ And I realized that no, it really wasn’t something that was all that widespread at that point,” said Rubin.

And so the bitcoin experiment was born.

In late October 2014, Rubin and fellow project leader Dan Elitzer, then an MBA student at Sloan, opened up enrollment. Students who wanted the $100 worth of bitcoin had to complete a few questionnaires and review educational materials.

Jeremy Rubin touring the NYSE during a 2013 internship.

“We wanted to get bitcoin out in the world more, and we wanted to spread the technology,” said Rubin. “We also wanted to study what it means to distribute a new asset.”

Students wanting to take part also had to set up their own crypto wallet, which at the time was hard enough to discourage participation. Still, in the end, 70% of students ended up jumping through all the hoops.

Phu was among the students who started a side hustle opening up crypto wallets for those who didn’t want to spend the time figuring out how to do it and were willing to yield a percentage of their bitcoin as a fee for services rendered.

“A lot of the students would pay the other students half of the bitcoin if they would set it up on their behalf,” explained Phu. He says he helped somewhere between 10 and 12 people set up crypto wallets in exchange for a commission paid in bitcoin. It’s somewhat taken the sting out of the fact that he spent $100 worth of bitcoin — worth more than $14,000 today — on two sushi dinners.

Trabucco says that back when he was a student, he didn’t think that much of the project, though he did manage to triple his bitcoin handout playing poker online.

“Half the people I knew actually registered it as an event,” said Trabucco. As far as he was concerned, he thought bitcoin was cool, but “didn’t really think it was going to be the future of finance.”

But already having a crypto wallet did lower the barrier to entry to the cryptosphere later in life. Trabucco now runs Alameda Research, which manages over $1 billion in digital assets and trades up to $10 billion per day across thousands of products, including all major coins and altcoins, as well as their derivatives.

“I can’t say for sure whether it was the deciding factor, but it certainly could have been, because if I didn’t already have an account, I’m not sure if I would have ended up doing this,” he said.

Phu, Rubin and Trabucco all declined to share how much they kept and how much crypto they’ve accrued since their days on campus.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts

(Photo: Bloomberg / Getty Images)

Where all the bitcoin went

When CNBC spoke to Catalini, he was taking a walk to break up the 12 to 14 hours a day he spends on Zoom working.

Among Catalini’s lasting takeaways is the fact that bitcoin simply didn’t work as a method of payment on campus.

“Even at the time, the technology was quite user unfriendly,” he said. “Even within a pretty tech-savvy community such as MIT, it was kind of surprising to see how much work it really was to use bitcoin at the time.”

But that inability to spend was probably for the best.

“What was fascinating is that in a sense, the MIT students got it right. The vast majority held on to their bitcoin as an investment. And maybe it sounds obvious given the price has appreciated so dramatically. But I think in 2014, it wasn’t clear at all that something that was worth at the time, I think $250, would be worth more than that,” he said.

Technology

Sam Altman says OpenAI will top $20 billion in annualized revenue this year, hundreds of billions by 2030

Published

1 hour ago

November 6, 2025

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Sam Altman says OpenAI will top billion in annualized revenue this year, hundreds of billions by 2030

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks to media following a Q&A at the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.

Shelby Tauber | Reuters

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Thursday that the artificial intelligence startup is on track to generate more than $20 billion in annualized revenue run rate this year, with plans to grow to hundreds of billions in sales by 2030.

The company has inked more than $1.4 trillion of infrastructure deals in recent months to try and build out the data centers it says are needed to meet growing demand. The staggering sum has raised questions from investors and others in the industry about where OpenAI will come up with the money.

“We are trying to build the infrastructure for a future economy powered by AI, and given everything we see on the horizon in our research program, this is the time to invest to be really scaling up our technology,” Altman wrote in a post on X. “Massive infrastructure projects take quite awhile to build, so we have to start now.”

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit research lab in 2015, but has become one of the fastest-growing commercial entities on the planet following the launch of its chatbot ChatGPT in 2022. The startup is currently valued at $500 billion, though it’s still not profitable.

In September, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC that OpenAI was on track to generate $13 billion in revenue this year.

Friar caught the attention of the Trump administration this week after she saying at at event that OpenAI is looking to create an ecosystem of banks, private equity and a federal “backstop” or “guarantee” that could help the company finance its investments in cutting-edge chips.

She clarified those comments late Wednesday, writing in a post on LinkedIn that OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop for its infrastructure commitments.

“I used the word ‘backstop’ and it muddied the point,” Friar wrote. “As the full clip of my answer shows, I was making the point that American strength in technology will come from building real industrial capacity which requires the private sector and government playing their part.”

Venture capitalist David Sacks, who is serving as President Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar, said Thursday that there will be “no federal bailout for AI.” He wrote in a post on X that if one frontier model company in the U.S. fails, another will take its place.

Altman said Thursday that OpenAI does “not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI datacenters.” He said taxpayers should not bail out companies that make poor decisions, and that “if we get it wrong, that’s on us.”

“This is the bet we are making, and given our vantage point, we feel good about it,” Altman wrote. “But we of course could be wrong, and the market—not the government—will deal with it if we are.”

WATCH: Trump AI czar David Sacks says ‘no federal bailout for AI’ after OpenAI CFO’s comments

Technology

Apple’s AI roadmap looks brighter — plus, Costco delivers upbeat sales numbers

Published

2 hours ago

November 6, 2025

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Apple's AI roadmap looks brighter — plus, Costco delivers upbeat sales numbers

Technology

Meta reportedly projected 10% of 2024 sales came from scam, fraud ads

Published

3 hours ago

November 6, 2025

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Meta reportedly projected 10% of 2024 sales came from scam, fraud ads

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during a dinner with tech leaders in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025. US President Donald Trump said he would be imposing tariffs on semiconductor imports “very shortly” but spare goods from companies like Apple Inc. that have pledged to boost their US investments. Photographer: Will Oliver/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Will Oliver | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Meta projected that 10% of its overall sales in 2024, or about $16 billion, came from running online ads for scams and banned goods, according to a Thursday report from Reuters.

Those kinds of ads included promotions for “fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos and the sale of banned medical products,” according to the Reuters report, which was based on internal company documents. Those documents showed the company’s attempts to measure the prevalence of fraudulent advertising on its apps like Facebook and Instagram.

Meta brought in more than $164.5 billion in overall sales for 2024. Last week, the company said that third-quarter sales rose 26% year-over-year to $51.24 billion and that it lifted the low end of its total expenses for the year by $2 billion as part of its massive investments into artificial intelligence.

The Reuters report cited a December 2024 document that showed how Meta each year generates roughly $7 billion in annualized sales from so-called “higher risk” scam ads, which are promotions that are clearly deceptive. Each day, Meta shows users an estimated 15 billion of these higher risk scam ads, the Reuters report said, citing a separate document.

Although some of the documents show that Meta aims to reduce the amount of bogus ads on its platform, the Reuters report also said that other documents suggest the company is concerned that its business projections could be impacted by any abrupt removal of the fraudulent promotions.

A Meta spokesperson said that the company “aggressively” addresses scam and fraud ads on its apps. The projections that 10% of the company’s 2024 ad sales came from bunk ads “was a rough and overly-inclusive estimate rather than a definitive or final figure; in fact, subsequent review revealed that many of these ads weren’t violating at all,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

“Unfortunately, the leaked documents present a selective view that distorts Meta’s approach to fraud and scams by focusing on our efforts to assess the scale of the challenge, not the full range of actions we have taken to address the problem,” the spokesperson said.

WATCH: Wall Street backs AI winners, and Meta’s not one of them this quarter.