This reminds me of a very similar campaign Paypal did to help jumpstart the online payments market. Paypal offered $20 to anyone for opening an account or referring a new user[1]. This served to help rapidly grow a market of Paypal users before one existed.
The difference being that most of these students will receive the free bitcoin and hold, hoping they appreciate in value, instead of transacting and contributing to the network effect.
Is this myth not dead yet? People spend bitcoin and want to spend it. There is also speculation and hoarding, but no universal law that says you can't do both.
$10 isn't even much to hoard. If the price goes up 10x that's still just $100. This is more like, "Oh, you got our drinks, I'll pay you back in btc!" kind of money.
How and when did hoarding bitcoin become a myth? Last I checked number of transactions per day was decreasing. And the C2C aspect you describe is unlikely to take off given the ease of cash or tools like Venmo, and lack of availability of bitcoin apps on iOS.
The myth here is that "people want to spend bitcoin." Just take a look at the bitcoin transaction volume merchants are seeing beyond the first few days.
My point was not that hoarding is a myth - my point was that "people will not spend bitcoin, because they will only hoard it" is a myth.
Have you actually talked to people who own bitcoin? They want places to spend it.
> Just take a look at the bitcoin transaction volume merchants are seeing beyond the first few days.
This doesn't really mean anything. First-day enthusiasim can't be held as representative of the greater trend. The greater trend being that more merchants are accepting bitcoin over time, and more bitcoin is being spent on real things.
It's not a myth because it's true. There are so many people holding on to it as investments that it's not even funny. There are people making so much money off of bitcoin it's ridiculous.
Has Coinbase posted a list of the "top 500" colleges that are supported, or are we left to guess? I signed up a few minutes ago and haven't seen anything yet.
Edit: Still not showing up. Kinda scummy to advertise this to college students and not follow through, especially in the heat of finals week.
I just tried my @ufl.edu address and it didn't work. I would assume my university is large enough to be included.
Also, as a side note, they sent me an email asking me to subscribe to their blog before they sent a verification email. Once I subscribed to their blog then I realized it was not the same as user verification, lol.
That's interesting... (and a little too bad for you, since a lot of systems will give you student discounts and all just for the .edu email address), how come it is that way? Is that a thing with a lot of Canadian universities, or?
Yeah it's a shame. The wiki page for ".edu" specifies "Since 2001, new registrants to the domain have been required to be United States-affiliated institutions of higher education, though before then non-U.S.-affiliated—and even non-educational institutions—registered, with some retaining their registrations to the present."
@umail.ucsb.edu didn't work either but I already have a Coinbase account that I registered from this IP address, maybe it is something to do with that?
My friend at Orange Coast College just signed up with her .edu email address and it didn't work. I think its a scam to get people's email addresses. I don't think I'll ever refer anyone to Coinbase again now and I'm a previously happy customer.
I'm not going to abuse this myself, but at MIT you can create seemingly-unlimited @mit.edu email addresses using Moira.
Getting a bunch of fresh IPs might be trickier, but you could probably wander around different WiFi access points, use the CSAIL OpenStack installation, or maybe just renew a DHCP lease a bunch.
User-agents a easy to find and change with a browser extension (or scripting).
This is a great idea, just got mine! It worked for Paypal back in the day to boost signups. Hopefully between this and the MIT program we'll see more interesting transactions in BTC as opposed to people holding it as a lottery ticket.
I tried this with my purdue.edu email a few days ago and it didn't work at all. I think it was because I used a computer in an on-campus lab to sign up. When emailing Coinbase support I got these responses that, while prompt, were unhelpful in actually fixing the issue:
>My apologies for the trouble! In some cases, we may not be able to credit this promotional bonus to new accounts. If we are able to credit it to your account, it will be displayed on the Transactions page immediately after signup.
>If another user used the same device to redeem the .edu promotional bonus, we unfortunately would not be able to credit it to your account at this time.
Anyone from coinbase here? Are there plans for international universities? Mine does not use a .edu but rather a country specific one. Would love to hit all students with this but I need to know first that they would be accepted.
This is a great initiative on Coinbase's part. Will definitely get a lot of adopters because the free money will incentivize the use and then the experience of using Bitcoin should hold on to the new users.
http://monash.edu is based in Australia. It also apparently has campuses in Malaysia, South Africa, India, Italy and China.
There's also the embarrassingly bad http://australia.edu/, which is not a university and even has public signup for @australia.edu emails. Perhaps that will allow access to this promotion.
Did not work for University of Twente emails (utwente.nl). Please know that all Dutch public universities are firmly within the top 500 of universities worldwide (whichever ranking you pick) but don't have .edu email addresses!
It's a shame, because I know a lot of people who would like to experiment with Bitcoins.
It doesn't appear to work with a regular viginia.edu email (at least not if the BTC are supposed to be deposited immediately upon account confirmation).
1 (I highly recommend watching the full conversation as it's immensely interesting) - http://youtu.be/vDwzmJpI4io?t=11m21s