A talk with the director of DCI at MIT, Neha Narula, on the role academia plays in the Bitcoin ecosystem and how that might evolve over time.
At the MIT Bitcoin Expo earlier this month I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Neha Narula, the Director of the Digital Currency Initiative under the MIT Media Lab.
Neha previously studied at MIT, completing her PhD in 2015. Her research and work has tended to focus on distributed systems and databases, with many contributions involving analysis of the potential shortcomings and risks of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs).
She previously worked on relaunching the news aggregation platform Digg, and worked at Google as a senior software engineer, where she designed Blobstore, a scheme for redundant replication and delivery of massive amounts of data.
We discussed the history of the MIT DCI and its role in the history of Bitcoin development in research, as well as the role of academic research in general as it relates to Bitcoin and cryptographic or blockchain systems.
You can watch the interview here:
Shinobi is an pseudonymous self taught educator in the Bitcoin space. He was the co-host of Block Digest, a news/tech oriented Bitcoin podcast, as well as What Bitcoin Did Tech Show with Peter McCormack which centered around explaining technical concepts to non-technical users. That is all he will tell us about himself.
