An AI-run hedge fund has created a #cryptocurrency for its human data scientists

An AI-run hedge fund has created a #cryptocurrency for its human data scientists http://bit.ly/2l03lgZ #Blockchain #AI #Crowdsourcing
#PrisonersDillemma #DataScience #Network #GameTheory

‘Why is tech positive-sum and finance zero-sum?’

12,000 data scientists were issued 1 million crypto-tokens to incentivize the construction of an #ArtificialYntelligenceHedgeFund. Here’s why.
Money was invented to solve the coincidence of wants problem and facilitate transactions. But as fiat currencies continue to lose relevance into the 21st century, cryptocurrency presents solutions far beyond money transfer. Cryptocurrency can now be used to incentivize cooperation in populations.

With cryptocurrency, money can now be software. There can be programmed rules for how money behaves. The ability to program money seems subtle, but small changes to the rules of money can have large effects on the behavior of the holders of that money. For a historical example of primitive money software influencing a population, see The Wörgl Experiment of 1932. For a modern example, consider how bitcoin incentivized thousands of people around the world to mine it.

The stock market presents a situation similar to the prisoner’s dilemma. The market would be better off if market participants collaborated, but rationally they don’t. Regular money simply does not incentivize them correctly. Regular money is too low-tech.

Imagine the #PrisonersDilemma in a world that exists entirely on a #blockchain.

Now suppose the prisoners are issued a cryptocurrency similar to a normal money except for one small change: it is programmed to self-destruct whenever anyone goes to prison. By defining the money in this way, the prisoners’ fates are now financially bound. Prisoners in this scenario realize that if they don’t keep the other prisoner out of jail, they will lose all of their money with certainty.

This new cryptocurrency results in a world where citizens have a financial incentive to collaborate to keep each other out of jail. The prisoners are still motivated by self-interest but they now live in a universe where the money nudges them to collaborate in pursuit of that self-interest.

"The higher the scientists sit on the leaderboard, the more Numeraire they receive. But it’s not really a currency they can use to pay for stuff. It’s a way of betting that their machine learning models will do well on the live market. If their trades succeed, they get their Numeraire back as well as a payment in bitcoin—a kind of dividend. If their trades go bust, the company destroys their Numeraire, and they don’t get paid.

The new system encourages the data scientists to build models that work on live trades, not just test data. The value of Numeraire also grows in proportion to the overall success of the hedge fund, because Numerai will pay out more bitcoin to data scientists betting Numeraire as the fund grows. “If Numerai were to pay out $1 million per month to people who staked Numeraire, then the value of Numeraire will be very high, because staking Numeraire will be the only way to earn that $1 million,” Craib says.

It’s a tricky but ingenious logic: Everyone betting Numeraire has an incentive to get everyone else to build the best models possible, because the more the fund grows, the bigger the dividends for all. Everyone involved has the incentive to recruit yet more talent—a structure that rewards collaboration."