FILE - Bitcoin, cryptocurrency
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Illinois universities are offering students more opportunities to learn about digital currencies such as bitcoin as interest in cryptocurrencies and the technology behind them grows.
Gib Bassett, head of the Finance Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said interest in the subject is driven as much by the students as it is the faculty.
“The students read about cryptocurrency a lot, and they are very interested in learning about its potential role in the economy,” Bassett said.
Bassett said he will have a class panel in April with members of the Chicago exchanges and will feature local digital currency experts.
“I am going to have a panel discussion with some local professionals in the industry who have been involved with initiatives regarding cryptocurrency,” Bassett said.
Bassett said his panel is just one discussion in an eight-part class, but he could one day see full special-topics classes being created to further discuss digital currency.
“I would not be surprised that both in finance departments and in computer science departments, the bitcoin and blockchain are going to become I’m sure full classes,” Bassett said.
Blockchain is the digital ledger distributed among numerous computers that tracks transactions of digital currencies and records them both publicly and chronologically. It is constantly growing and allows investors to keep track of transactions without a central recordkeeper, according to Investopedia.
Bassett said he was not sure about the future of digital currency and said he has heard mixed signals from people he has discussed it with. Some hold that digital currency is a bubble not worth investing in, he said.
“And on the other side, there are people who are equally intelligent who claim that bitcoin and even more so, blockchain, will be taking over the world,” Bassett said.