New Jersey slaps MIT Bitcoin hackers with subpoena - and they're fighting back
The MIT students behind Bitcoin mining program Tidbit won the “most innovative” award at a recent hackathon.
But they will soon face a ruling from another kind of judge: one employed by the state of New Jersey.
In early December, a few weeks after the hackathon, the New Jersey division of consumer affairs issued a subpoena to 19-year-old Tidbit developer Jeremy Rubin. The subpoena demanded he turn over everything related to Tidbit: all versions of the source code, all Bitcoin wallets associated with Tidbit, all agreements and communications with third parties, the name and IP addresses of everyone who mined Bitcoins using Tidbit, and so on. It explicitly asked for “all documents and correspondence concerning all breaches of security and / or unauthorized access to computers” by Tidbit.
