The startup that immediately came to mind here is CrowdMed: http://readwrite.com/2013/05/08/crowdmed-wants-to-crowdsourc... . Crowdsourced diagnoses are a regulatory and liability minefield, but the upside to patients is huge and (in my opinion) worth the risk - instead of an impersonal WebMD, you get individual attention by experts to specific cases, with oversight from other community experts in the form of powerful downvotes.

N.B. CrowdMed's spend-reputation-to-answer "prediction market" methodology (in contrast to the free-to-answer StackOverflow/Quora model), described a bit in the article, might be of interest to other HN'ers. I would expect it to drive away potential contributors, but in the case of CrowdMed, it seems that the potential contributors with other incentives to contribute are also the higher-quality contributors (namely people who want to do good with their answers and are confident in their expertise) so it tends to weed out only the bad actors. It's a dynamic that's worth considering for anyone starting a Q&A site of any kind.

I'm skeptical that's true in medicine, though it depends on how else they filter their community. My own experience is that non-doctors with strong opinions about medicine that they feel motivated to share are usually precisely the people you don't want medical advice from. Often they are adherents of one or another alternative-medicine system, or otherwise have really idiosyncratic views.

It's amazing how much wasted energy is spent on pseudo science. From zero-energy devices to "secret" cancer cures. Those involved create boogie men(usually the government) who are repressing "the truth", as the actual data to support their claims is weak. Rallying people against a common enemy is easier than coming up with an actual product that works. It's incredibly lazy, and usually a few minutes of research will cast doubt on claims. The scamsters are scum, but you can see the motivation. Those who actually believe are scarier.

It has created a new way to send money across the world with very small fees. This may not be such a big deal for Americans, but in some countries being able to send money to/from abroad when they can't access a bank account or Paypal account is a big big thing.

It does have it's weaknesses though. The first is that you need a good knowledge of security to successfully manage your own bitcoin stored offline. For example how intuitive is it that spending from the same address twice is a potential security hole? Or that your RNG isn't good enough.

Otherwise you store it online, but that has a lot of risk as we have seen with so many successful attacks in myriad different ways.

The other problem is no one really trades in units of Bitcoin. The value of something is in a fiat currency e.g. USD which then needs to be converted to Bitcoin, and so when your Bitcoin crashes to 50% of what it was worth yesterday, it becomes high risk just to hold it. It has no intrinsic worth.

Also, no currency has any intrinsic worth anymore. Currencies are all a consensual mass hallucination. I still think it's feasible that if enough of us agree that bitcoins are worth something, then they are worth something.

The biggest difference with bitcoins is that nobody can create them out of thin air due to whim like they can with USD.

Are you sure (see http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/04/11/an-illustr...) plenty of examples. Maybe not over 24 hours, but certainly over short time periods.

I agree volitile isn't worthless. But it limits the mass adoption I have about 3BTC and I saw them be worth $600 and now $300. Had I been an ordinary 'risk averse' person, and I paid $600 for them I'd be pretty cheesed off (aka pissed).

>> Also, no currency has any intrinsic worth anymore.

Yes! This can be generalized to "nothing has ever had, has, or will have any intrinsic worth", which I agree with. A dead cow is worth more than a bar of gold on a desert island, but vice-versa in the 'normal world'.

>> The biggest difference with bitcoins is that nobody can create them out of thin air due to whim like they can with USD.

Yes BTC is more like Gold in that respect, although ironically the intended use case is a currency not an investment. Fiat currencies are the best confidence trick. Even if you know you are being conned, you still have to play along!

I've never really understood the objection that people have with regards to the Fed printing USD (for instance). It's actually a pretty powerful regulatory tool, isn't it? A small amount of inflation is fine (I think the Fed targets about 2%), but high inflation or deflation is a problem for people who have savings in USD. One way to manage inflation is to control the amount of dollars in circulation, which can be controlled by printing or not printing new dollars (and removing old ones from circulation). There are other ways, but the Fed is fairly limited in terms of techniques it can apply. Can someone explain why bitcoin advocates so often object to that control?

Maybe this will happen. Who knows.

Bitcoins/Altcoin "mining" creates coins out of thin air (+ silicon and electricity).

Yes, but not at a whim; that's the important distinction. The precise creation schedule for all bitcoins ever is known in advance (and Bitcoin creation is slowing, and eventually will stop). This is distinct from any fiat currency, where the minting authority can arbitrarily decide to inflate all your cash holdings out of existence. This has happened many times throughout history. See the German Papiermark.

All currencies are "virtual". They all exist because we agree they exist. They're all a consensus reality. Due to the banking system, most USD exists merely because banks claim they exist.

The point of bitcoins is internet cash. They are frequently compared to credit cards because that's what we mostly use right now, but bitcoins behave a lot more like cash. They are mostly anonymous like cash, mostly irreversible like cash, instantaneous like cash. You can't whisk away coins and bills on the internet, you can't use credit cards without identifying yourself completely, you can't use any other currency on the internet without a 3rd party's permission.

If you live in any country (say the US), and engage in economic activity, and never acquire the local currency, you WILL go to jail for tax evasion. At some point, you need to acquire the local currency to pay your taxes, otherwise men with guns will put you in prison. Fiat currency's demand is underpinned by this.

You have also conflated demand deposits and currency. Demand deposits are usually worth the same as currency, and it is true that this is because of confidence. However, there have been several times in the last century in the US (and many other countries) where that has not been true.

If you think bitcoin is anonymous (or mostly anonymous, whatever that means), I have a bridge to sell you. Bitcoin is taxable (meaning that transactions in it are taxable events). I can guarantee the IRS (and probably the FBI) have developed (and are developing) some neat little analysis tools.

It always pays to remember that despite the huge number of crimes committed by Al Capone, he was only convicted of evasion of federal income tax.

My prediction is that BitCoin will become so heavily regulated that it will end up being more expensive to use than USD for international transactions; more expensive because there will be lower volumes. Not using the regulated channels will result in heavy fines, or men with guns putting you in a metal box.

Sell me that bridge. Identify the bitcoins I've used. Perhaps you'll succeed in finding some, but I don't think you'll succeed in finding all.

Cash is taxable too. I've paid plenty of taxes when using bitcoins, and unlike many other bitcoiners, I actually think taxes are a great thing. I don't think bitcoins' near anonymity have anything to do with evading taxes, anymore than paying with cash at the grocery register is enabling me to avoid taxes.

I don't want to make any predictions for bitcoins. I don't know if they will be heavily regulated or not. But so far, it has been very convenient for me to have internet cash.

That they could. Anything could. The question I don't have a convincing answer to is why would they use the Blockchain?

Although bitcoin makes the blockchain look capitalist, its underlying tendencies are like that of the internet at large - self organizing infrastructure for information.

A cheaper version of western Union is great and so is reduced fees for merchants. There is so much more that can be done with blockchain technology but I don't think it well happen as soon as 2015 because of the chasm between the people who understand the technology and the people who understand the business and law.

Go run a tip system on reddit using fiat currency.

Go try sending money to someone in Ethiopia in fiat currency.

Ensure nobody can steal your money without you making a mistake first (either giving someone else access, or leaving your wallet password in the open).

Transfer a large sum of money (in excess of, say, 100k) in seconds between an arbitrary sender and receiver.

changetip is off chain so it doesn't matter what currency you use it would work the exact same. There are other micropayment and tipping systems that don't use bitcoin and they are just about as successful as changetip(not very).

>Go try sending money to someone in Ethiopia in fiat currency.

Try sending money to someone in Ethiopia using bitcoin in a way they allows them to actually use it in Ethiopia.

>Ensure nobody can steal your money without you making a mistake first (either giving someone else access, or leaving your wallet password in the open).

Ensure that if you do make a simple mistake(how many relatives do you know that have installed toolbars? Thats the level of simple mistake you have to avoid) you will lose all your money with no recourse.

>Transfer a large sum of money (in excess of, say, 100k) in seconds between an arbitrary sender and receiver.

Large wire transfers are simple and given the cost and difficulty of acquiring 100k worth of bitcoin would almost certainly be cheaper and faster.

I would add to that safer too. Something goes wrong you can call the banks and they can roll things back. There is a paper trail that works in your favor.

(though if someone could show up with actual clones (or near enough to) of the mba range that would be awesome.

Check ou Ethereum!

https://www.ethereum.org/