The greatest bitcoin / jelly bean experiment of all time — How much pounding can one online survey form take?
For as long as I can remember, my crypto comms (mostly telegram and twitter) have been jamming up with frantic posts of “Where’s the bottom?”, “When does the pain stop?” and the occasional “Why did you let me remortgage my house to buy crypto!?”.
While everybody involved in crypto has a vested interest in knowing where the price of Bitcoin will bottom out, no one really knows the answer. With that in mind, my colleagues and I thought it might be cool if we tried an experiment for tapping the WISDOM OF THE CROWDS and sharing the results back with everyone who participates.
Because this sh*t actually works (the wisdom of the crowd that is - a concept I’ll dig into below,) the average price estimate we generate through this experiment could prove extremely valuable to you and your friends — especially if any of them are considering remortgaging their house to go all in on their crypto portfolio (Don’t do that —JUST. DON’T. DO THAT.)
How to Join
To join the experiment and receive the average price estimate of everybody’s guesses, click the below START button (under the picture of the jelly beans) and tell us your best guess as to where the price of bitcoin will bottom out (i.e., what will be the lowest price we will ever see again for Bitcoin / BTC?), and when will we see it — what date)
If you want to give us your email (you don’t have to), we’ll send you the average price estimate after we receive the first 5,000 guesses. After that, we will continue to share the updated price estimate averages with you every 1,000 guesses thereafter.
If you share this article on your socials and you help us get some momentum, the result of this experiment could be invaluable. In theory, it could continue paying off indefinitely.
Just FYI, we’re not going to be publishing the results of the survey online and we ask that you please refrain from doing so yourself. For the best possible outcome, the results of this experiment must ONLY BE SHARED WITH PARTICIPANTS — exclusively.
Let’s do this!
This sh*t actually works
Don’t forget to click the Start button above. If you’ve already done that, let me briefly introduce the concept and history behind the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ and how it applies to crypto.
In 1906, in a rainy coastal town in South-West England, a group of townsmen participated in a contest to guess the weight of an ox. Upon studying the results, Francis Galton, one of the true polymaths of the modern age, stumbled upon a simple but revolutionary observation. An observation that would change the history of mathematics and constitute some initial grounds for the field of statistics.
Astonishingly, Galton found that although not a single individual in the crowd of townsmen had guessed the weight of the ox correctly, the median of all answers taken together approached the actual weight with surprising accuracy—within 1% of the measured result.
80 years later, In 1987, a similar experiment was conducted by Jack Treynor, Professor of Finance at the University of Southern California, in an effort to prove market efficiency. This time, participants were asked to estimate the number of jelly beans in a jar. While the actual number was 850, the median answer was 871. Only one in 56 individual participants made a guess that was closer to the true value than the group median was.
Since the times of Galton, the field of statistics have been put on more and more solid footing, and the concept of the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ has found many more implementations beyond estimating the body mass of bovines or the number of jelly beans in a jar. In 2004, it even led financial journalist James Surowiecki to dedicate a book to the phenomenon, which has been favorably compared to bestsellers by Malcolm Gladwell.
In terms of the crypto-economics, here is what hasalways astounded me — Why do crypto investors seem to care so much about price estimates from so-called experts? Almost all these people have clear conflicts of interests, and by definition they are only able to provide one guess. On top of this, we tend to ask the same opinion makers who’s estimates have historically been wrong by orders of magnitude to have another crack at this impossible prediction game.
By now we all understand that today’s media culture benefits those who dare to make bold newsworthy statements in a pursuit for eyes and clicks. In the everlasting effort to save our precious time and resources, we have developed an inbuilt aversion towards thoughtful analysis (and neat experiments). As markets anticipate a turnaround, we can expect more and more of these expert opinions to feature in the media.
And yet, the wisdom of the crowds states that taking all the answers of a group together is far superior to the answer of any individual in that group. If the conditions are right, your guess is as good as that of Roger Ver, Charlie Lee or Tim Draper. The right circumstances for a group to be more intelligent than the individuals it consists of are if there is diversity and independence.
To join the experiment and tell us your prediction for where Bitcoin will reach its bottom price, click the start button above (after the picture of the jelly beans)
About Me: I’m an entrepreneur in the crypto space. My team and I are building a product to make “Crypto the way it’s meant to be — Ridiculously fun and easy. No wallets. No exchanges needed.” You can find out more about our Cryptocurrency portfolio project at Portfolio.io or you can contact me directly. .
