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MIT May Help Lead Bitcoin Standards Effort
gthuang88 writes: With everyone from PayPal merchants to Rand Paul starting to accept Bitcoins as payment, the race is on to develop technical standards for the virtual currency. Now MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito is getting ready to unveil a plan for MIT to become an independent, neutral home for standards development. Ito is enlisting cryptographer Ron Rivest and economist Simon Johnson to help with the effort, which could provide an academic alternative to the Bitcoin Foundation for conversations about the currency's future. Ito says, "I’m not pushing it, but I’m offering MIT as a neutral academic home for some of the conversations and the technical coordination. Which I think will give a lot more stability to Bitcoin, which right now is a little bit fragile."
What a completely myopic and naive view of the world you've got.
You need bitcoins to interact with the Bitcoin network, which maintains the blockchain, a distributed and decentralized database that can essentially record all manner of data in a robust, tamper-proof, even programmatic fashion outside of the control of any special interest. That is the real-world value of bitcoins: Access to the Bitcoin network.
This access will become all the more valuable when related technologies become functional, such as decentralized market places and especially decentralized prediction markets. Already today, people find access to the Bitcoin network to be valuable, as they are selling cars and houses and goods and services of every kind in exchange for precious bitcoins.
You know what, though? It doesn't matter whether you don't understand this; the world has no problem leaving you behind.