Ricardo Pérez-Marco Creates Bitcoin Award for Math Gold Medalists From Spain

Bitcoin is the best kind of reward for remarkable intellectual merit and accomplishments. This is why Spanish university professor and researcher Ricardo Pérez-Marco has decided to create his own scholarship program to award prodigious students from his native country who win gold medals in the international math olympics.

Pérez-Marco is no stranger to such prizes: in 1986, he has won the first silver medal in the history of Spanish mathematics. But since he was not able to get the gold medal, 34 years later he created a way for talented and hard-working Spanish students to get a digital gold medal to accompany their physical one.

How Can Spanish Gold Medalists in Math Get Their Bitcoins?

Ideally, each Spanish student who gets a gold medal at the international math olympics will receive the Bitcoin equivalent of 10.000 euro. The money would get transferred by Ricardo Pérez-Marco at the daily exchange rate.

If there are too many winners in one year and the bitcoins deposited in the scholarship fund aren’t sufficient to cover the 10.000 euro quota, then a fair division of the satoshis will be made to reward all Spanish gold medalists in mathematics.

And if no student gets a gold medal, then Ricardo Pérez-Marco won’t transfer any bitcoins. It’s a gold for gold kind of transfer, and Spanish students can’t receive the digital version without winning the gold one first.

Important note: these BTC donations will be anonymous and get sent directly from the fund. As of December 27th 2020, the Bitcoin address corresponding to this fund contains 1 BTC – enough money to reward two gold medals at today’s exchange rate.

Private Donations Are Also Accepted

To further encourage excellence in the study of mathematics, Ricardo Pérez-Marco also allows private donors to step in and contribute. Unlike the anonymous nature of his Bitcoin award, he allows individuals and entities that donate between 1000 and 3000 euros in BTC to receive acknowledgment for their contributions. Interestingly, donations from banks are not accepted (but the ones coming from governmental agencies and NGOs are on the list).

To immortalize the contributions of these private donors, the reward will feature the mention “With the participation of…”, followed by an enumeration of those who gave bitcoin sums ranging between 1000 and 3000 euros.

Furthermore, private and anonymous donations can be made at any time regardless of the amount.

Who Is Ricardo Pérez-Marco?

Ricardo Pérez-Marco is a Spanish mathematician who teaches and publishes research papers at the Mathematics Institute of Jussieu-Paris Rive Gauche from Paris, which is a department of the Paris Diderot University. He has been publishing research papers since 1993, but is best known in the Bitcoin space for his analysis of selfish mining and the proposal for Ant Routing to help the Lightning Network scale (he published the paper along with academic collaborators Cyril Grunspan and Gabriel Lehéricy).

I’ve also had the pleasure of interviewing him for Bitcoin Magazine back in September 2019, and he is responsible for introducing me to the theories involved in scaling the Lightning Network via better routing mechanisms.

You can find his academic work on this official institutional page, and for further details about the BTC reward for Spanish gold medalists visit the scholarship’s dedicated page. If you’re interested in these projects, you should follow Ricardo Pérez-Marco on Twitter or send him an e-mail.

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Then please make a donation to support my work. 50% of all amounts sent to this address will be redirected to Ricardo Pérez-Marco’s award fund.

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