Scientists have crunched data to predict crime, hospital visits, and government uprisings — so why not the price of Bitcoin? A researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory recently developed a machine-learning algorithm that can predict the price of the infamously volatile cryptocurrency Bitcoin, allowing his team to nearly double its investment over a period of 50 days. Earlier this year, principal investigator Devavrat Shah and recent graduate Kang Zhang - who are both also affiliated with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems - collected price data from all major Bitcoin exchanges, every second for five months, accumulating more than 200 million data points.