From Forbes, March 6:
In winter quarter of 2013, Stanford officials were perplexed that 10% of the energy used in a 100-person dorm seemed to be consumed by one room. They kicked down the doors and walked in to find a room hotter than a sauna, with machines and equipment whirring - students had put together a Bitcoin mining rig in their dorm room. The first wave of Bitcoin mania was sweeping through Stanford.Bitcoin early adopter and venture capitalist Tim Draper gave an evangelical talk at Stanford later that year. It was not uncommon in a classroom to see students day trading Bitcoin instead of taking notes. Though it was not at the price point or hype level it is at today, interest in the currency was spreading like wildfire. Flash forward five years, and these former freshman and sophomore crypto enthusiasts are now CEOs of their own crypto companies - the Stanford Bitcoin Mafia has been formed.
At the heart of the 2013 Bitcoin craze at Stanford was the CS 184 class taught by Andreessen Horowitz partners Balaji Srinivisan and Vijay Pande. Srinivasan later went on to found Earn, formerly 21.co, a Bitcoin startup with $115 million in funding that monetizes email and social media accounts. Srinivasan’s first iteration of the class in 2013 focused on a mix of startup theory and practice, interspersed with various Silicon Valley power players as guest lecturers. While not the focus of the class, Bitcoin was covered and became a huge point of discussion in the class’ bi-weekly hackathons. From the hackathons, the Stanford Bitcoin Group was born, a Bitcoin research team supervised by Srinivasan and Pande.*"The PayPal Mafia: Who are they and where are Silicon Valley's richest group of men now?" (EBAY; TSLA; LNKD; FB)
“For CS 184, you could optionally show up in the engineering building at 6pm on Thursday and just work on projects together,” Andy Bromberg said, CEO of CoinList, an AngelList spinout that catalogs tokens. “The group that ended up being the Stanford Bitcoin Group typically stayed until 6 in the morning, working all night together on things. Discussion would separate from the projects we were working on in class, and start digging into other things, like Bitcoin or other futurism projects. That’s where we really bonded. Late nights, early mornings.”
Other crypto founders like Nadav Hollander of Dharma Protocol were students in the class, but the Stanford Bitcoin Group consisted of seven core members. In addition to Bromberg, the group included John Backus and Alain Meier, founders of Bloom and Cognito, Ryan Breslow, founder of Bolt, Chris Barber, an investor, Matt Rials, a developer at Coinbase and then Netflix, and Pat Briggs, a developer at Google. The students were mentored by Srinivasan and Pande in a variety of Bitcoin related projects. Research consisted of Bitcoin trends and trading volumes, analyzing the Bitcoin protocol, and even exploring how Bitcoin could have affected economic disasters in countries like Greece. There was also a lot of effort put into the evangelical side, teaching people how to use Bitcoin and showing them that it mattered. “Right now it’s lots of forking, lots of different camps,” Breslow said. “There was a lot more alignment back then, a focus on making Bitcoin popular. It was a bit more altruistic.”
As part of their evangelical efforts, Breslow attempted a Bitcoin drop at Stanford, trying to emulate the MIT Bitcoin Club who gave $500,000 worth of Bitcoin in 2013 to undergraduates across campus, worth millions now. However, he abandoned the idea after running into complications with the Stanford bureaucracy. Despite their extensive research, the Stanford Bitcoin Group never formally published anything, as there was simply no interest from the public. According to Breslow, “99/100 people you brought Bitcoin into conversation with had never heard of it.”...MUCH MORE
