Meet the College Students Who Are Driving the Future of Bitcoin

If he is nervous about the upcoming meeting, Jeremy Gardner doesn't show any sign of it.

Today, Gardner and a friend, Daniel Bloch, will be sitting down with senior administrators in the development office at the University of Michigan to discuss what it would take to process university donations in Bitcoin. If the administration likes what they have to say, Michigan may soon become the first major university to accept Bitcoin gifts.

Gardner, a 22-year-old junior and recent transfer from Bard College, is a co-founder with Bloch of the College Cryptocurrency Network, a burgeoning association of Bitcoin clubs on campuses nationwide. In its first weeks, the network has already attracted important mentors, among them Will Pangman, who sits on the education committee of the Bitcoin Foundation. Circle, a well-funded cryptocurrency startup, wants to be a corporate sponsor. The meeting this week in Ann Arbor will be an early milestone marking a whirlwind two months since CCN's founding.

It will also be a sign that the full impact of Bitcoin has yet to be felt; indeed, that entire user bases remain to be tapped. "People are calling Bitcoin the money of the Internet," Gardner says. "I think it's going to the Internet of money."

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Gardner isn't alone in that thought. In fact, The Economist said as much in a recent issue. And despite some negative headlines this year, a growing number of investors are acting accordingly. Last month, Bitcoin startups Circle, Kraken and Xapo announced a combined $42 million in new funding. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen pledged recently to invest hundreds of millions more in the Bitcoin space, on top of the $50 million his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has already sunk in. Also last month, San Francisco-based hedge fund Pantera Capital announced the formation of a new $147 million fund for investments in digital currencies and related startups.

But even as venture capitalists, institutional investors and hedge funds begin to pour Scrooge McDuckian sums of money into this nascent ecosystem, an even stronger indication that Bitcoin has a future may lie on college campuses.

At first blush, student groups would seem a strange barometer of the future durability of a breakthrough technology. But think of how Facebook started at Harvard and spread to universities around the country, becoming a private club for college kids long before it opened up to everyone else. Then, too, think of which demographic propelled Snapchat to a multi-billion-dollar valuation.

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"The younger generation is always more open to adopting new technologies and new paradigms," says Dan Elitzer, a first-year MBA student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and CCN's regional director for New England. "If Bitcoin is going to be successful in the broader world, it's going to be successful on college campuses earlier than we see it in most other communities."

For years, youthful enthusiasm for new technology has been translating into huge windfalls for entrepreneurs and savvy investors. Ironically, this means that the key to Bitcoin's future may rest not with the investors themselves but with people like Jeremy Gardner.

The betterment of millions

Since he was 11, Gardner has been determined to leave the world better than he found it. He grew up the sort of person on whom global warming weighs heavily. He had always assumed the future held for him a life of public service, a career in politics. The son of a leading expert in Confucianism, he discovered Sun Tzu's The Art of War in high school and it came as a revelation.

Things flowed naturally from there: At Bard College, where he was an honors student, he built his own major, political strategy -- blending elements of political studies, economics, psychology and military strategy. For the last of these, he obtained special permission to take classes at West Point, the military academy.

Related: Why College Students Need to Be Entrepreneurial With Their Careers

In the fall of 2013, he joined the campaign of Maura Healey, who was running for attorney general of Massachusetts. And that's where his life plan went sideways. Although Gardner believed Healey was the best candidate and deserved to win, he soon became disgusted with the role of money in politics, with the sheer amount of time that has to be spent raising funds rather than shaping policy, and he left.

For the first time in years, he didn't know what the future held. "There was this void in my life, where I wondered how I was going to change the world," he says.

Bitcoin has filled that void. It is a technology that Gardner believes could lead to the betterment of millions of lives. As a global transaction network, it could be used for remittances -- the practice of workers, usually recent immigrants, sending a portion of their pay back home to their families in another country. Remittances are a $550 billion industry, according to the World Bank. Established international money transmitters Western Union and MoneyGram charge fees as high as 10 percent for some amounts and destinations.

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One the other hand, all-in-one Bitcoin companies like Coinbase offer the ability to buy and sell bitcoins for fiat currency, store them in a cloud-hosted wallet and send and receive them from others. At most, users pay a 1 percent fee for transactions. (A payments industry insider recently confided to me that legacy money transmitters like Western Union and MoneyGram are seriously concerned about Bitcoin.)

"I think it's an incredibly democratizing technology," Gardner says. "All of a sudden, people who have come to America for the American Dream, and are trying to support their family back in Kenya, and are driving a taxi in New York, and who don't want to give 9 percent of their hard-earned cash to Western Union -- Bitcoin allows them to do that. That alone is a worthy cause for me to pursue."

But that potential wasn't immediately apparent to Gardner. Like many people, he first heard of Bitcoin in connection with Silk Road, the online black market which the FBI shut down last fall and which has since been resurrected under new management. Curious, he visited the site and poked around, but didn't buy anything. "Nothing I really want to get myself arrested for," he thought.

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By the fall of 2013, however, some of Gardner's more tech-savvy friends were telling him to buy bitcoins. He had doubts about its real value, but it sounded like easy money. His aunt had taught him the basic precepts of investing; he had been buying stocks for years. If Bitcoin was a bubble, it was one he could ride with a fair amount of confidence.

Moreover, he began to be convinced that the shutdown of Silk Road that October would lead to a surge in Bitcoin's value. He traded a few thousand dollars for bitcoins when the digital currency was worth about $140. He sold when the price went above $1,000.

So far, so profit. But Gardner wasn't willing to commit myself to understanding the technology behind this weird speculative commodity. Not yet.

A major revolution

His tune changed when he transferred to the University of Michigan in January. His roommate, Kinnard Hockenhull, is involved in a Bitcoin startup, and the other man was thrilled to have a sounding board.

Fired up by Hockenhull, Gardner began to read more about Bitcoin. The more he read, the more aware he became of its possible applications as a commodity, a currency and a transaction network. Meanwhile, he was obsessively reading Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers in advance of a scheduled Jan. 27 appearance by the author in Ann Arbor. He was particularly fascinated by Gladwell's analysis of the fact that 14 of the richest people who ever lived were all Americans born within a nine-year period in the middle of the 19th century. Evidently they were born late enough to foresee the Industrial Revolution, the building of the railroads and the rise of Wall Street, but not so late that they weren't able to capitalize on these events. A similar pattern emerged in the early days of the personal computer revolution, and again at the dawn of the commercial Internet.

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"Every single day, I would read this Gladwell chapter, and I would read a bit more about Bitcoin," Gardner says.

Finally, at 2 a.m. on the night before Gladwell was scheduled to speak, Gardner was struck with the realization that Bitcoin may represent yet another watershed moment. "Holy shit, this may be it," he thought. "This is one of those major revolutions."

From that moment, he was hooked. He became active in the Bitcoin club at the University of Michigan, which is how he found himself on Feb. 5 on a videoconference call with Bloch, Elitzer and three other guys, members of the Bitcoin clubs at MIT and Stanford. Before long, they were agreeing to launch the CCN, with Michigan as its head chapter.