Blockchain Revolution

GETTING THE WORD OUT: THE CRITICAL ROLE OF EDUCATION
Joichi Ito is among an elite group of widely successful entrepreneurs—from Bill
Gates and Steve Jobs to Biz Stone and Mark Zuckerberg—who dropped out of
college to invent something new in the digital economy.
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It is a hallmark of our
entrepreneurial culture that one’s pursuit of an idea, to go deep and understand its
nuances as Ito likes to say, drives a visionary out of the classroom and into business.
Henry Ford and Walt Disney pursued their passions without college degrees. And so it
is one of those paradoxes that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would
choose Ito to direct its legendary Media Lab, at the epicenter of all things digital and
relevant to culture.
The timing was perfect. “Digital currency is something that I’ve been interested in
even before the Media Lab. . . . I ran one of the really early digital test servers from
the DigiCash days in the 1990s. One of the first books I ever wrote was in Japanese,
called Digital Cash, that I coauthored with someone from the Bank of Japan. So this
has been an area of interest for me for a long time and predates a lot of the other stuff
I’ve been doing.”
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When he got to the Media Lab, various academics were dabbling in some aspect
of bitcoin relative to their core discipline—consensus models, cryptography, computer
security, distributed systems, and economics—but no one specifically focused on it.
He didn’t see faculty doing fundamental research around bitcoin, even though MIT

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students had launched the MIT Bitcoin Project to give $100 of bitcoin to
undergraduates.
Ito had a sense of urgency similar to Imogen Heap’s in spreading the word and
forming teams around legal, technical, and creative challenges. Blockchain
technologies were moving much faster than Internet technologies had, but without
much academic involvement. The core developers of the bitcoin protocols were
recovering from reputational hits: the Bitcoin Foundation was bankrupt, and board
member Mark Karpeles was arrested in Japan for embezzlement through his Mt. Gox
exchange. Ito moved quickly. He launched the Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) at the
Media Lab and hired former White House adviser Brian Forde to direct it. He brought
three of the bitcoin core developers into the DCI to provide them with stability and
resources so they could focus on the code.
He thought that creating an academic network of universities interested in
supporting bitcoin was important, and that’s under way. “We’re setting up courses,
we’re trying to organize research, but we’re still very early-stage,” he said. “We’ve
just got the core funding together to support the program, and we’re just trying to
drum up interest from the faculty and the students in the space.” More broadly, he
wants the MIT Media Lab to reinvent higher education so that people like him won’t
drop out and will see the value of a diverse place like the Lab. It’s an opportunity to
pilot the future of academia.
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Melanie Swan, a leading blockchain theorist and academic, was more specific
about where to educate students about the blockchain, and it’s not in traditional
universities. It’s on the blockchain. “It’s really a complete revolution in how we do
everything. Academia is not the right place to do academic thinking about very new
things like the blockchain,” she said. For example, rather than submitting research to
scholarly journals for publication and waiting from six to eighteen months for a
rejection or publication, a scholar could post the paper immediately as Satoshi
Nakamoto did to a limited audience of peers, receive reviews in real time, and
establish the needed credibility to publish to a larger audience. Reviewers could vote
reviews up or down as redditors do on Reddit so that the scholar would know which
ones to take to heart. The paper might even be available for free, but other scientists
could subscribe to deeper analysis or threaded discussion with the author. The scholar
could make her raw data available or share it with other scientists as part of a smart
contract. If there was a commercial opportunity flowing from the paper, she could
protect the rights in advance, taking into consideration who funded the research and
any claims they might make to the discovery.
Swan is the founder of the Institute for Blockchain Studies. “There’s the start of a
development of an educational infrastructure to support learning about these
technologies. Obviously, all the meetups, user groups, and hackathons are

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tremendously useful,” she said. “Every strategy and accounting consultancy has a
blockchain practice group now, and there are education institutions like Blockchain
University.”
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Swan herself teaches a blockchain workshop at Singularity University.
She talked of an education system where a college student would become what
she called an “educational sommelier,” pairing interests or needed skills with
accredited courses, potentially massive open online courses (MOOCs). “The benefit
of MOOC is decentralized education. So I can take the top machine learning class
from Andrew Ng at Stanford University via Coursera. I can take the top other courses
at MIT.” So students could fund their own personal development programs anywhere
in the world and receive accreditation. She explained: “Just as when I go take the
GRE or the GMAT or the LSAT, I show up with my ID, it confirms locally that I am
who I say I am, I take that test,” and that local confirmation “could easily be part of
the MOOC infrastructure.”
Swan has been working on how to do MOOC accreditation and tackle student
debt on the blockchain. The blockchain provides three elements toward this goal: (1) a
trustable proof of truth mechanism, an oracle, to confirm that the students who signed
up for the Coursera classes actually completed them, took the tests, and mastered the
material; (2) a payment mechanism; and (3) smart contracts that could constitute
learning plans. Consider smart contracts for literacy. “Why don’t we target financial
aid toward personal development? Like Kiva, but Kiva for literacy,” Swan said,
except that everything would be super transparent and participants would be
accountable. Donors could sponsor individual children, put money toward learning
goals, and pay out according to achievement. “Say I wanted to fund a schoolchild in
Kenya’s literacy program. Every week this child would need to provide proof of
completion of a reading module. Perhaps it’s all automated through an online test
where the blockchain confirmed the child’s identity and recorded progress before
disbursing the next week’s worth of funding into what we might call the child’s ‘smart
wallet for learning’ so that the child could continue payment for school without
interference. Money toward a girl’s education couldn’t be diverted to her brother’s
schooling,” she said.
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