Bitcoin Apathy at Stanford

Stanford faculty don't care about Bitcoin (yet)

This year, I spent my sabbatical at Stanford, where I received my PhD in economics 20 years ago. I wrote three different papers on Bitcoin, which I will release soon. But I also met with about a dozen faculty about Bitcoin, ranging from an assistant professor all the way up to a Nobel laureate. The reactions I faced varied from apathy to hostility.

Let me first provide some anecdotal evidence of the critiques I faced. While I have not done this experiment at other schools, I would expect the critiques to be similar, especially at other top engineering schools like Carnegie Mellon, MIT, or Caltech. Stanford competes with these other schools from the same pool of talent, and they broadly have the same mental models in mind. Let me go through the criticisms and speculate on how to address these moving forward.