I'm very excited about it. Not because it's booming right now (introduced on Bittrex earlier today and already hitting $~85 per coin) but because it's way for everyone to win.
Here's an excerpt from a Wired article running through it:
"Based in San Francisco, Numerai is a hedge fund in which an artificially intelligent system chooses all the trades. But it's not a system Craib built alone. Instead, several thousand anonymous data scientists compete to create the best trading algorithms—and win bitcoin for their efforts. The whole concept may sound like a bad Silicon Valley joke. But Numerai has been making trades in this way for more than a year, and Craib says it's making money. It's also attracted marquee backers like Howard Morgan, a founder of Renaissance Technologies, the wildly successful hedge fund that pioneered an earlier iteration of tech-powered trading.
The system is elegant in its way: Numerai encrypts its trading data before sharing it with the data scientists to prevent them from mimicking the fund's trades themselves. At the same time, the company carefully organizes this encrypted data in a way that allows the data scientists to build models that are potentially able to make better trades. The crowdsourced approach seems to be working—to a point. But in Craib's eyes, the system still suffers from a major drawback: If the best scientist wins, that scientist has little incentive to get other talented colleagues involved. The wisdom of the crowd runs up against Wall Street's core ethos of self-interest: make the most money for yourself.
That's where Craib's new token comes in. Craib and company believe Numerai can become even more successful if it can align the incentives of everyone involved. They hope its new kind of currency, Numeraire, will turn its online competition into a collaboration—and turn Wall Street on its head in the process."
What do you think?
