Universities have the opportunity to facilitate experiential entrepreneurship education right under their noses but they don’t see it. Yet. A fascinating article about maverick students mining cryptocurrency using university computer systems in some shades of grey areas can be found below following the Academic Entrepreneur’s commentary.
Hmmmmmm let’s think. The Academic Entrepreneur has a quiz for you. What other students used university computer systems in a questionable way, in the area of the grey to profit themselves?
A. Bill Gates, Co-Founder of Microsoft in the Harvard University computer labs
B. Dan Cane and the CourseInfo (now Blackboard) team of 7 Cornell undergraduates
C. Andy Bechtolsheim, Co-founder of Sun Microsystems as a PhD Student at Stanford University
D. Numerous student entrepreneurs in universities all over the land and too numerous to count.
E. All of the above
If you answered E, you are correct.
University computer systems are the great resource in the land of student (and academic) entrepreneurship and universities should recognize that fact. They provide experiential entrepreneurship education. As Gordon Mitchell points out in the article below
And over in the business school, where students are encouraged to be entrepreneurial, understanding cryptocurrencies could bring some very real benefits. Cryptocurrency mining requires a student to think about the likelihood of successfully mining a particular coin and the best way of pooling resources to increase success. It also requires an appreciation of the costs associated with the activity, even if the resources are free to the student.
If they go on to trade their cryptocurrency, still more skills need to be developed. All of the coin exchanges mirror the functions and principles of a more traditional securities market. Trading cryptocurrency can give students the chance to experience a form of trading floor without the issues of access or cost associated with more mainstream exchanges.
Cryptocurrency mining, creation, trading, and analysis is a goldmind of opportunity for universities to explore not only for the learning potential through experiential entrepreneurship pedagogy, but also for real wealth creation for their soon-to-be alumni entrepreneurs as well as the university’s revenues and assets themselves.
Yet the ignorance of the modern university administration when it comes to the potential of the university computing system for entrepreneurial seeding amazes the Academic Entrepreneur. In his experience with almost every single university except for Stanford, these institutions and their computing departments and network heads just don’t get it. When he was the CEO of Student Agencies Incorporated (SAI), he had good encounters with Cornell University, which piped a T3 into the independent, non-profit offices just off of campus. Originally set up to feed an off-campus Cornell research center with plenty of bandwidth, the university obliged and allowed the T3 to continue to serve SAI’s incubated start-ups that were housed in the space. From this resource sprang two companies that IPO’d on the NASDAQ and one that was acquired by Microsoft for $40 million. All three were started by students. But otherwise, Cornell University, at the time, was somewhat clueless about the potential of its systems for more spinouts, startups, and industry-university interaction.
However, in general, anything out of the ordinary, and remotely entrepreneurial, universities seem to be clueless on, or resistant to at least. The Academic Entrepreneur’s experience at the University of Edinburgh was that the staff there was kind and open to listening to possibilities of partnering with new ventures, but had no clue as to how to do this. It was as if we were from way out in outerspace, beings from Planet X who wanted to do something otherwordly. It simply was not possible.
While Robert points out the illogical policy of banning cryptocurrency mining as opposed to Facebook or YouTube for that matter, I am inspired to point out the need for universities to do the following five things:
A) Invest much more heavily in computer systems, computers, and network capabilities as this is informatics entrepreneurship rocket fuel;
B) Allow cryptocurrency datamining;
C) Set up programmatic incubation and acceleration for new student (and faculty) venture creation in the emerging cryptocurrency space;
D) Set up funding mechanism to provide seed capital for entrepreneurs in the above programme;
E) Retrain their entire computing and networking staff in entrepreneurial infrascture and organisational processes
We are at the very beginning here. Cryptocurrency will change the world as we know it. Just wait and see. 10 years out, we may well see the demise of the central banks. There is not stopping the inevitable, and we should instead harness its energy, embrace it, and leverage it starting now.
The articele of reference can be found here: http://theconversation.com/universities-should-ban-facebook-before-punishing-dogecoin-miners-24143
I have reposted the entire post below written by Gordon Fletcher from the blog The Conversation.
Universities should ban Facebook before punishing Dogecoin miners
Universities are facing a dilemma now that students have been discovered mining cryptocurrencies using campus facilities. Are these students displaying entrepreneurship or unacceptable behaviour?
Harvard has decided it’s the latter, permanently banning an unidentified person from using its computer research facilities after they were found using a supercomputer to mine dogecoin. It is not known if the punished miner was a student or member of staff.
Imperial College London now needs to choose a side in this argument after a student – who also remains anonymous – revealed that they had been using campus facilities to mine around £20-worth of the cryptocurrency.
Many grey area
This campus-based Dogecoin generation follows several months of intense interest in Bitcoin mining. The spectacularly sudden rise and fall of bitcoin prices has shown that other cryptocurrencies also have the potential to bring further massive windfalls. With at least 200 cryptocurrencies that can currently be exchanged into bitcoin and then onto more familiar forms of everyday fiat money, its no wonder people are tempted to try to get rich quick.
In both cases, computing power and electricity were being used without the official knowledge or approval of the university so Harvard’s response is not necessarily that surprising. But other universities may well be wondering what their position should be on this issue in anticipation of finding one of their own students mining.
A quick search throws up no reference to bitcoin or cryptocurrency within the acceptable use policies published by IT departments. Although there are coverall policies about not using facilities for commercial purposes or for loading software without permission, miners could still technically continue with their activities without breaking a specific rule.
Such learning
There are only two valid arguments that a suitably informed IT manager could fall back on if they decided to pursue a miner caught in the act.
Computers, and particularly their component chips, quickly fail when they operate at a high temperature for too long. Any enthusiastic miner with access to “free” computing power will want to run a computer at 100% of its capacity for as long as possible to extract the maximum number of coins. This will reduce the lifespan of any computer – potentially quite significantly.
The more invisible but equally important cost of mining is the value of the electricity consumed. All the online calculators for determining return on investment for mining cryptocurrency consider this important factor. If you’re spending hundreds of pounds to produce a handful of Dogecoins, it’s probably not worth the effort, but in a university environment, the cost of electricity is a more complicated equation.
While mining on a computer for long periods of time will consume electricity, this will be only marginally greater than a computer in a common access lab being used for Facebooking or watching cat videos on YouTube – two activities that appear to represent much of the activity that goes on in any university’s common-use computer labs. The key difference is that mining directly converts electricity into exchangeable value for the student. Using Facebook on a university computer only converts the university’s electricity into value for Facebook, by enabling the delivery of advertising to students. You don’t often see universities banning Facebook though.
And over in the business school, where students are encouraged to be entrepreneurial, understanding cryptocurrencies could bring some very real benefits. Cryptocurrency mining requires a student to think about the likelihood of successfully mining a particular coin and the best way of pooling resources to increase success. It also requires an appreciation of the costs associated with the activity, even if the resources are free to the student.
If they go on to trade their cryptocurrency, still more skills need to be developed. All of the coin exchanges mirror the functions and principles of a more traditional securities market. Trading cryptocurrency can give students the chance to experience a form of trading floor without the issues of access or cost associated with more mainstream exchanges.
Most importantly, actively encouraging an understanding of mining among students would help to avoid “futility mining”, mining for those coins that produce such a low return on investment that the setup, electricity and maintenance costs are never recovered. With awareness, students would avoid mining Bitcoin entirely. Those using a desktop computer with no specialised hardware such as a graphics cards designed for high-end gaming would learn to steer clear of mining cryptocurrencies that are based on the calculation function used by Bitcoin technology.
Without specialist technology mining these coins is simply not viable. My own experience mining coins based on the original Bitcoin technology is evidence of how difficult it is and how unimpressive the returns can be for small-scale mining.
After three weeks of mining with a specialist USB-based device, my portfolio of 134,000 coins represented in 13 different currencies are nominally worth 94.5 US cents at March 2014 prices. Of course, with time and some luck these coins could become much more valuable but nothing is certain in cryptocurrency.
This is why the two anonymous individuals from Harvard and Imperial College were mining dogecoin. Based on an alternative technology to bitcoin, dogecoin and other similar coins are easier to mine in a university computer lab. However, it will not be long before even this phase of the cryptocurrency gold rush will become the domain of large scale operators with custom equipment.
All of these interrelated complexities coupled with cutting edge concepts and technologies are exactly the types of knowledge and skills that universities seek to teach to their undergraduate and postgraduate students. Rather than pursuing the anonymous Imperial College student perhaps he or she should be invited to offer guest lectures to the computer science, business and management, IT and MBA students. That is, if they can be dragged away from Facebook long enough to listen
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