“I don’t give a shit about all this talk of legal tenders,” said Hamburg, “I just want my goddamn chicken tenders.”
Photo by Jack Yang
In light of the campus-wide dining crisis, Chancellor Khosla announced last weekend a wave of sweeping reforms for the Housing and Dining program, starting with the replacement of Dining Dollars with an on-campus cryptocurrency exchange. Under the new Crypto and Kitchen Exchange (CAKE) program, UCSD dining plans have been changed to new “dining portfolios,” with students picking between Tritonium, Geisel Libcoin, and the Chancellor’s own branded cryptocurrency, KhoslaCoin.
The crypto-culinary change came soon after student complaints about high dining prices and wait times flooded HDH offices. After a brief experiment converting Dining Dollars to Triton Cash failed to alleviate concerns, the Chancellor’s Office released an official report detailing the immediate replacement of student accounts with the “revolutionary state-of-the-art crypto exchange system.” The report also boasted of plans to demolish the Gilman Parking Structure and introduce a massive “KhoslaCoin Mining Megafarm,” a renovation which will cost 255 million dollars from loans according to projections.
While the university has yet to issue an official summary of CAKE’s effectiveness, student responses have been less than enthusiastic. A particular concern has been the volatile nature of the dining portfolios. “I woke up this morning with three thousand dollars worth of KhoslaCoin,” lamented Jack Hamburg, a first-year who purchased the “Khosla’s Blessing” portfolio. “But when I went to order food, the value of my account had fallen to nine dollars. I’m still not sure if I should hold, or just spend it all on a Triton Burger at Café Ventanas.” Continued drops in crypto value during lunch hours have only further increased tensions. A few similarly-minded undergraduates, fed up with being unfed, staged an impromptu protest outside 64 Degrees, some waving cardboard signs proclaiming “Only Legal Tender for Chicken Tenders.”
But not all students have shown scorn at the new system. Marcus Zukburger, a CS major from Warren, has spent most of his spare time in the Dungeon to mine extra crypto for his dining portfolio. Zukburger claims to have already amassed a small fortune through the CAKE program. “They keep the Supercomputer Center locked up,” Zukburger laughed, with an expression on his face as glazed as the donut in his hand. “Think of all the KhoslaCoin I could mine with that!” Having wired the doors shut, Zukburger plans to remain camped out in the Dungeon until the end of the week, much to the displeasure of disoriented CSE students seeking shelter from the light of the sun.
As Friday drew to a close, campus crypto dropped to a new low, putting many into the red with their portfolios. Some student attitudes toward the situation have been resigned. “We’re all going to end up in debt from tuition anyway,” one economics major declared. “What’s the difference if we also starve alongside it?” Hungry for real change, undergraduates have taken to gathering daily outside the Chancellor’s Complex, waiting for news of a rollback. But when asked to comment on the effectiveness of his new plan, Khosla only bit back with a stinging retort. “Here’s something for you to chew on: which one of us has enough business experience to know what works? This new cryptocurrency system is going to revolutionize UCSD. Down with dining dollars, I say! Let them eat CAKE!”
