Lately I’ve noticed that one of the most trending searches in Google is the phrase “Bitcoin price 2015”. Of course who wouldn’t want to know ahead of time what would be the price, but what if I told you that this just might be possible.



How to figure out the weight of an ox

Trust me, this is Bitcoin related. In 1906, eight hundred people participated in a public contest to guess the weight of an ox. The median guess which was 1207 pounds was accurate within 1% of the true weight (1198 pounds). This lead to something called “the wisdom of the crowd”. The basic concept means that a crowd of non experts can collectively reach an answer that is as good as, and sometimes better than what a single expert can produce.



Proof that crowd wisdom actually works

If it was perhaps hard to get a lot of people to answer a single question 100 years ago, today it’s much easier through the use of the Internet. If you want some real live examples for crowd wisdom you can just take a look at companies like Waze – which shows you the best route to take using inputs from other drivers or Wikipedia which gives us incredibly detailed and accurate information using the collective editing of “average” people like you and me.

How crowd wisdom is related to Bitcoin ?

First and foremost, the whole Bitcoin network is on big “crowd wisdom protocol” – where the crowd decides which transactions are valid or not. But to be more specific I want to create an experiment. I would like for you to try and guess what would be Bitcoin’s price 6 months from today – on March 21st, 2015. I don’t care if you’re a Bitcoin expert or that this is the first time you’ve ever heard of Bitcoin – just give it your best shot. All of the entries are anonymous and it doesn’t require anything to participate. Once you answer you will be able to see what other participants have entered as well.

What’s your guess for Bitcoin’s price in 2015 ?

Loading…

Of course I’ll be sure to follow up on this and see if we were able to guess it even close to the actual price.

Why not show the results before you guess Bitcoin’s price in 2015 ?

Crowd wisdom has its limitation, the main one being that the group of people answering the question needs to be as diverse as possible – that’s why it doesn’t matter if you’re an expert or a newbie when you answer this. Another limitation is the fact that its best that participant have limited communication between one another as social influence can cause the answers to be wildly inaccurate. That’s why you are allowed to see the results only after you submit your answer.