In this four-minute video over at Forbes (forgive their ad, they know not what they do), Brewster Kahle talks about some of the experiments the Internet Archive has been doing around Bitcoin for the last couple of years. He has been paying employees in Bitcoin, and they even set up a credit union that accepts the crypto-currency.
We’ve been talking a bit about Bitcoin at DTLT over the past few months after Tim Owens and Martha Burtis decided to start play the market—it was pretty exciting to seem how quickly they got so deeply into this world. In fact, I even got $15 worth of Bitcoin as a Christmas gift from Tim, which means I’ll be a million one day I’m still cnoceptually trying to wrap my head around Bitcoin, and the best way for me to do that is to teach a course about it, but this might be out of my league. Wouldn’t it make an interesting Freshman Seminar? In fact, when we were talking about the future of the internet topic in The Internet Course, one of the ideas students were most fascinated and garrulous around was this idea of internet-native currencies. Anyway, maybe we can pull a series of scholars from a few disciplines and have an experimental seminar on the topic—why not?