A new hedge fund is relying on an anonymous army of coders to turn a profit

The hedge fund Numerai is unusually large in staff compared to its rivals, boasting over 7,500 developers. But what's most unusual is that those employees can be entirely anonymous. As TechCrunch reports, the San Francisco startup sends out encrypted trading data to coders that have signed up to work for it. They each develop different machine-learning techniques to make forecasts based on the data, then send predictions back to Numerai. If they're useful, the data scientist gets paid in Bitcoin.