MIT May Help Lead Bitcoin Standards Effort

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday April 11, 2015 @05:40AM from the rename-it-MITcoin dept.

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."

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Re:"everyone from PayPal merchants to Rand Paul" by itzly · 2015-04-11 07:02 · Score: 5, Insightful

The industrial use of gold is fairly small on the total gold market. Most of the value comes from people's desire to possess it, and people like to possess it because it's valuable.
If it was just for the industrial use, the price of gold would be a lot lower.