Is Higher Education Starting to Embrace Bitcoin? – Bitcoin Magazine
This is a transcribed excerpt of the “Bitcoin Magazine Podcast”, hosted by P and Q. In this episode, they are joined by Korok Ray to talk about Bitcoin being integrated into the university curriculum.
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Question: Bitcoin doesn’t always have the most positive feeling around it. There are some very passionate people who feel strongly about Bitcoin, especially those in academia. I’m curious what conversations are like with some of your colleagues who may not necessarily see Bitcoin the same way you do.
Korok Ray: Yes. I encountered many of these conversations when I was trying to hold my conference. So, I would say, first among the universe of universities, Texas A&M is likely to give Bitcoin as fair a shake as any university. There are other universities that are, I would say, actively hostile.
My campus and my colleagues were more neutral. They said, “Why Bitcoin, why not another coin? Who really cares? Why should we go out and have a conference about this brand new technology? Why can’t we just sit back and wait and let the market see if this has any value?” It was more of my experience from my colleagues here. They were a little less reluctant to plant a flag and take a position on Bitcoin specifically, or even crypto. Some of them said that the whole crypto space is too speculative. “We’re universities. We want to be a little more slow and deliberate and backward-looking.”
Personally, I think it’s a mistake. I think universities need to be forward thinking and we need to take a stand and we need to speak from a place of conviction. We need to figure out what we believe, have a debate about it, and then we can explore different ideas based on those beliefs. Today, much of what is happening in universities is that it is not really a place for free speech anymore. If you have a different set of beliefs than that, you may suffer from it, internally.
I think what happens in the academic community, especially among economists, very generally, is quite agnostic. I’d say it ranges from hostile, at worst, to agnostic about Bitcoin. I think a lot of this, they just don’t get it, and they’re not willing to address and understand it for what it is.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence for me to say that no economist could have created Bitcoin. Our training in the financial field, we just don’t have the skills or the knowledge to actually be able to take an idea and implement it in a real way.
Economists are good at commenting on things that have happened in the past, or trying to make some vague predictions about the future, where they have no skin in the game. That is basically what economists do, both academic and professional economists. Some of my colleagues around the US (when I tried to get them to speak at my conference and speak Bitcoin) the best of them would say, “I don’t know enough about it, so I’m not going to speak. ”
So it was like the best. Then the worst answers would be things like, “Gee, I don’t know if I believe in Bitcoin, but I think blockchain technology could be good.” You would get such silly answers. I think ultimately it’s because of the academic community, as I said earlier, they’re not structured to be able to understand Bitcoin, and you have to be a bit maladjusted, as I have become, to really be able to address what Bitcoin is intellectual in an honest way because you have to be able to leave relying solely on your own discipline and embrace multiple disciplines at the same time and try to see how they fit together, which I think Bitcoin does in a beautiful and wonderful way.
I think it’s still an ongoing battle. The fight I plan to fight in my career in my life is to help educate others about Bitcoin and what it is and how it works. I think we have the right ideas on our side and over time we can convince the academic community that this is worthwhile and that this is worth studying and this is worth understanding.
