Blockchain Revolution

Academia
Academic institutions are funding labs and centers to study this technology and
collaborate with colleagues outside their silo. Brian Forde told us, “We started DCI to
catalyze some of the great resources we have at MIT to focus on this technology,
because we think it’s going to be one of the most important technological
transformations over the next ten years.”
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Joichi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab,
saw an opportunity for academia to step up: “MIT and the academic layer can be a
place where we can do assessments, do research, and be able to talk about things like
scalability without any bias or special interests.”
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Jerry Brito, one of the most
prominent legal voices in the space—first at the Mercatus Center at George Mason
University and now as director of Coin Center, a not-for-profit advocacy group—said,

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“Governance comes into play where there are serious decisions that need to be made,
and you need a process for that to happen.”
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He recommended starting with the
Hippocratic oath: first, do no harm. The current bottom-up approach that bitcoin’s
core developers are using “is showing a little bit of its rough edges right now with the
block-size debate. It’s going to be very difficult to get any consensus,” Brito said. “We
want to help develop that forum and foster a self-regulatory organization if it comes to
that.”
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Notable universities such as Stanford, Princeton, New York University, and
Duke also teach courses on blockchain, bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies.
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