This Crypto Could Help Fight a Future ‘Coronavirus’
The news of the coronavirus hitting Italy and South Korea hard this week has caused a wave of panic in financial markets.
Stocks are tumbling hard.
Now, it might seem strange that this information caused such a panic in the markets given we’ve known about the coronavirus for months now.
So why the sudden fear?
Well, part of that is the fact that the virus has mostly been confined to China so far. And a reality of today’s China is that data is notoriously unreliable.
Every morsel of official data is tainted by political ideology. That’s what happens when you have a top down command system that values loyalty to the party more than unbiased reporting of facts.
Unfortunately, when it comes to a potential pandemic (or other natural disaster), nature doesn’t give two hoots about your political views.
In the end, facts win out…
The rush is on
And that’s why the news that this virus is spreading faster than the official Chinese data may have suggested caused markets to plunge lower this week.
The rush is now on to try and get accurate data so other governments can suitably react. Things like:
How long is the gestation period?
How infectious is it?
What’s the true mortality rate?
These are all big unknowns because we can’t trust the Chinese data.
But imagine we could have got reliable data out of China early. Maybe not from official sources. But perhaps from brave whistle blowers, Doctors and scientists with the real facts at their fingertips.
Imagine these people could get out the real data, anonymously and with rewards for accuracy.
Would that have helped stop the spread? Would that have helped other countries prepare and implement proper controls?
Undoubtedly yes.
Well, the thing is one crypto project is making this future possible. It could allow reliable data to be sourced in all manner of circumstances.
And it could be the future of how ALL data is collected.
They are due to launch a very exciting new feature soon that makes this possible.
Let me introduce you to…
Unleashing the power of data
The project is called Numeraire [NMR].
Originally it was conceived as a project that allowed data scientists to create investment models on hidden data.
They billed themselves as the ultimate decentralised hedge fund.
Numeraire used the results of this data to make real investment decisions through a fund.
And so far, they’re getting great results.
As you can see the Numerai model so far has outperformed the traditional linear investing model as well as a machine learning model.
The wisdom of the crowds is working!
Another quick point to note is that Numeraire didn’t do a traditional ICO. So hopefully they avoid the risks that became apparent with the recent Enigma [ENG]debacle.
Instead they airdropped (for free) tokens to data scientists and people who are building on the project.
The project did receive professional funding from well-known venture capital company, Union Square Ventures too.
Now to the important bit…
The interesting thing about Numeraire is that anyone can stake an amount of NMR tokens to show confidence in their truth of their data, model or forecast.
So, the team behind Numeraire decided to expand upon the project and launch a new capability they call Erasure Bay.
In a nutshell Erasure Bay lets anyone stake an amount of Numeraire to signal their confidence behind a fact they know.
Customers can then pay the person for access to this information. If the information turns out to be incorrect, stakers will lose some of their staked NMR through a process called griefing.
You can read more about this process here if you’re interested.
But the main thing to note is that for the first time, people selling information have skin in the game. Meaning they’re exposed to the upside of being right and the downside of being wrong.
This adds huge confidence to people buying such information, especially in a world of fake news and useless predictions.
Now imagine such a system existed when coronavirus was hitting China.
A Doctor or medical researcher that could see things were getting worse in Wuhan could’ve alerted the outside world (or fellow Chinese in other regions) anonymously by staking NMR tokens and providing true statistics.
Not only would such a person have helped the world, they would also have potentially enriched themselves as you could imagine this data would be pretty valuable.
We often say crypto will change the world, and a lot of that focuses on the world of finance.
But with Erasure Bay, there’s a chance Numeraire will create a system that opens up the closed parts of the world. And in turn make the world a lot more transparent.
And that’s a great thing for humanity.
[RD2]https://medium.com/@thibault_bnd/erasure-protocol-nmr-investment-hypothesis-da5ecbaca3e5
