Stacks of bitcoins sit inside a communications room in London. (Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg)
(Bloomberg) -- Mary Spanjers has a winning lottery ticket, tucked away in a drawer, uncashed. It’s an artifact of her freshman year of college seven years ago at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She took advantage of a free offer of something strange and new: cryptocurrency. One-third of a Bitcoin, to be exact. It was worth $100.