BERKELEY,
Calif. — While the price of Bitcoin has dropped since Christmas, the
virtual currency boom has shown no signs of cooling off in the more
august precincts of America’s elite universities.
Several
top schools have added or are rushing to add classes about Bitcoin and
the record-keeping technology that it introduced, known as the
blockchain.
Graduate-level
classes this semester at Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Duke, the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland,
among other places, illustrate the fascination with the technology
across several academic fields, and the assumption that it will outlast
the current speculative price bubble.
“There
was some gentle ribbing from my colleagues when I began giving talks on
Bitcoin,” said David Yermack, a business and law professor at New York
University who offered one of the first for-credit courses on the topic
back in 2014. “But within a few months, I was being invited to Basel to
talk with central bankers, and the joking from my colleagues stopped
after that.”
For
a class this semester, Mr. Yermack originally booked a lecture hall
that could fit 180 students, but he had to move the course to the
largest lecture hall at N.Y.U. when enrollment kept going up. He now has
225 people signed up for the class.
A
course about virtual currencies created by a Princeton computer science
professor, Arvind Narayanan, has been the fifth-most-popular class on
Coursera, an online learning site.
And
last month at the University of California, Berkeley, students were
lining the walls and sitting in the aisles for the first lecture of
“Blockchain, Cryptoeconomics and the Future of Technology, Business and
Law.”
“This
is a very precious opportunity for you to be able to sit in this
class,” Dawn Song, a computer science professor, told the students.
“There are a bazillion other students who are waiting for your spot.”
Because
developments in the field are moving so fast, the business school
professor also teaching the class, Greg La Blanc, said the students
would have to forgive the teachers if they got things wrong on occasion.
“We
aren’t waiting until we perfect it,” he said. “Don’t compare it to the
perfect blockchain course. Compare it to having no blockchain course at
all.”
The
75 spots in the Berkeley class were divided evenly among the law
school, the business school and the engineering department, and faculty
from the three departments are teaching the course together. Ms. Song
said she had around 100 students vying for the 25 places set aside for
her department.
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The
interest is a fueled by the rising price of virtual currencies over the
last year. But they have created a host of issues that are worthy of
study even apart from the price, professors in a variety of fields said.
For
lawyers, virtual currency projects have challenged traditional legal
categories and definitions of what constitutes a security or a
commodity.
Regulators
have been caught flat-footed as entrepreneurs have raised billions of
dollars by selling virtual currencies without going through the
traditional fund-raising channels, taking advantage of the legal
fuzziness surrounding them.
For
economists and business school professors, Bitcoin and other digital
tokens have raised questions about the nature of money. The first
lecture in the Berkeley class, for example, considered the development
of Bitcoin against the history of money.
Several
business school classes are also focusing on the decentralized methods
of record keeping and decision making introduced by Bitcoin.
Bitcoin
is given credit for creating the first blockchain, a ledger of
transactions that is updated by a network of computers without relying
on any central company or government.
Many
big companies are now looking at how blockchains independent of Bitcoin
might be used to do things like track music royalties or cargo
containers with input from the many parties involved.
“The
students in my class are from every possible discipline,” said Campbell
Harvey, a professor at Duke’s business school, who is teaching a class
with 231 students this semester. “They understand that this is going to
disrupt many different areas of business, and they want to be the
disrupters, not the disruptees.”
The
computer scientists, meanwhile, are digging into the cryptography that
virtual currencies use to secure their wallets and transaction data, as
well as the design of the distributed computer networks that make
blockchains possible.
Last week, Stanford University hosted a three-day conference
on the architecture and security of blockchain software, part of a new
cottage industry in academic conferences and journals that have sprung
up.
“Let’s
assume that tomorrow the price of Bitcoin drops down to $2,” said
Nicolas Christin, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, who
is teaching a course on “Cryptocurrencies, Blockchains and Applications”
this semester. “I still think it’s very cool from a technical
standpoint.”
Professors
and students alike said that aside from the academic possibilities,
familiarity with blockchain technology was becoming much more useful on
the job market.
The job site Indeed.com has reported a spike in job listings
that mention the blockchain, and there is now an entire site, Crypto
Jobs List, dedicated to opportunities in the young industry.
Vinny
Tuminelli, a business school student sitting at the back of the
Berkeley class, said that during an internship at Anheuser-Busch last
summer, the blockchain had come up in an “innovation team” he was on.
When he met with his supervisor more recently, the topic came up again.
“My
original understanding was that it was just thrown out there as a
buzzword,” Mr. Tuminelli said. “But now it seems like it has some legs
behind it, and people are putting real resources toward it.”
Students
appear to have caught on to the opportunity faster than their
professors. Berkeley students have created a campus club that offers
multiple courses on blockchain technology, taught by the students
themselves.
The
director of M.I.T.’s Digital Currency Initiative, Neha Narula, said
that when it didn’t schedule a course for this semester, she got
constant requests from students. So she put one together and is now
co-teaching it.
“Students are just fascinated with this area,” she said. “They want to learn about it desperately.”
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