MIT Bitcoin Expo 2021: The New Normal
Background
Last year, CoinDesk ranked MIT as the top university for blockchain in the United States, and we at the MIT Bitcoin Club are proud to play a role in making MIT a fertile ground for learning and growth in the space.
This year, we’ve covered everything from various Proof of Stake implementations (LCC/Hive, Casper, CBC, ECTO), to decentralized internet replacements (Sia, Blockstack, IPFS, etc), to private browsing (Tor, I2P), to scalability (Lightning and various other side chains, ETH2.0, etc), to zero-knowledge proofs (QAPs, polynomial commitments, SNARKs, even ran a trusted setup). We’ve also done beginner-friendly introductory discussions of crypto primitives such as hashing, Merkle trees, public key cryptography, signatures, and introductions to specific projects, such as Bitcoin andEthereum.
We are student and blockchain-enthusiasts run club, whose mission is to increase the awareness and use of cryptocurrency and to provide forums where blockchain-related ideas, projects, programs, and businesses can be studied, discussed, and developed. The club has also organized the MIT Bitcoin Expo every year since 2014 — a two day conference focused on all things blockchain.
8th Annual Expo
This year, we are excited to announce the 8th Annual Expo that will be held fully online and be completely free to the public. Join us April 3rd and 4th for what will be another exciting round of talks and panels at the MIT Bitcoin Expo.
Appropriately, our theme last year was Building the Stack. We focused on the state of the art of the emerging protocol stack. Since then, Bitcoin and Ethereum have reached all-time highs, marking the end of the crypto winter we’ve been in since 2018.
This year, our theme is The New Normal.
First, Guggenheim Partners, Micro Strategy, MassMutual and Tesla have all bought Bitcoin. These are examples of institutional adoption that has changed the narrative around Bitcoin. Further institutional adoption is also coming from the likes of Visa, MasterCard and BNY Mellon.
Second, the explosion of DeFi last year and Robinhood’s trading stoppage of GameStop and other stocks has changed the narrative around Ethereum and DeFi.
Finally, the United States’ Boston Federal reserve partnering with the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative to research central bank digital currencies (CBDC), the Ukrainian government hiring the Stellar Development Foundation to develop their CBDC, and China air-dropping digital yuan to its citizens to test their CBDC has changed the narrative around governmental adoption of cryptocurrencies.
All of this doesn’t even touch the technological advancements made in the field. Taproot has officially been merged into Bitcoin Core, Ethereum 2.0’s Beacon Chain has launched, and many more things have happened this past year that are worth looking into and discussing.
Whether you are new to the space or have been a part of it since the beginning, we want to welcome everyone around the world to join us online.
A special thank you to Hugo Uvegi, Manasi Vora, Nate Foss and Sacha Ghebali for their inputs and edits.
