FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

A Bitcoin Bazaar Is Springing Up Around MIT

It's Cambridge's "DeCENTRALized SQUARE."
Coinmap.org displays Bitcoin-friendly businesses in Cambridge. Image: Imgur/Reddit

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology nestled itself squarely at the center—or at least the East Coast center—of Bitcoinmania last month with its plan to give every undergrad student $100 worth of BTC this fall. And though the giveaway snatched up headlines, it’s not just a PR stunt.

The idea is to turn the university campus into what's essentially a real-world cryptocurrency lab, where bitcoin entrepreneurs can test out their ventures on a community armed and ready with a stash of digital coins.

Advertisement

This bitcoin optimism is spilling out into businesses situated near the MIT campus in Cambridge's Central Square, or "DeCENTRALized SQUARE" as one Redditor dubbed it.

A snapshot of the Open Street Map-based coinmap.org posted on Reddit this week shows a handful of businesses on Massachusetts Ave—the major road that runs from Boston over the Charles River to Cambridge, through MIT and on down to Harvard—that accept bitcoin.

Thelonious Monkfish was the first restaurant in New England to welcome virtual payments, starting last year. Down the block, Veggie Galaxy was the second.

Mass Ave is also home to one of the first Bitcoin ATMs in the US. The Liberty Teller ATM exchanges cash for bitcoins in seconds, which its founders hope will help expedite virtual currency adoption. There are now three machines in Boston: The first in South Station, second at Clover eatery in Harvard Square, and as of this week one in the Moksa pan Asian restaurant, right off the MIT campus.

"Before bitcoin goes mainstream, getting and using bitcoin needs to be as simple as possible," Liberty Teller cofounder Kyle Powers said in a press release this week. "Our kiosks and tutorials are helping us make that happen. Bitcoin makes sending money like sending email, and makes our current ways of sending money look like snail mail."

Comparing Bitcoin to the invention of email is a pretty bold statement to make, but cofounder Chris Yim, who graduated with an engineering degree from MIT, took it even a step further, comparing the digital currency to the early days of the internet.

Advertisement

"Cambridge and Boston are starting to become a major hub of bitcoin activity," Yim said. "People are starting to see how bitcoin could do to value what the internet did to information.”

The students behind the university's $100 bitcoin giveaway used the same analogy, arguing that arming the student population with a wallet full of digital coins is like providing access to the web in the early days of the internet.

Admittedly, four merchants and an ATM does not a crypto-economy make. But the mini-infrastructure is a start, and something for bitcoin enthusiasts to hang their hat on as the digital currency's image and value takes a beating of late.

The Mass Ave strip also isn't the only or first bitcoin bazaar in the US. The country's first 'Bitcoin Boulevard' recently launched in Cleveland, of all places.

That project curiously hit a snag when the Ohio government refused to let customers buy alcohol with BTC, reasoning that it's too volatile to be considered a currency and thus considered bartering for booze, a legal no-no in the Midwestern state.

The Cleveland strip was modeled on the first-in-the-world Bitcoin Boulevard, based in the Netherlands. (Buying liquor there, to no surprise, is A-OK.) In a Reddit comment, Bitcoin Boulevard US founder Nikhil Chand floated the idea of linking up the disparate local hubs.

"I have spoken with the folks at Bitcoin Boulevard NL, and with other groups in the States. We have discussed the idea of having 'bridges' between these types of communities, as a 'Bitcoin Boulevard' can happen anywhere," he wrote. "I think these relationships really feed into the global spirit of Bitcoin."

BTC's market valuation may be sinking, but it looks like the movement's gaining new momentum IRL.