[tmuir]

To everyone sure this will fail because of the amount of money required, ask yourself this: if you told your mom, and your neighbor, and your mailman, and your boss about the Occulus Rift, or Pebble, or The Peachy Printer, or Zach Braff's latest movie, and the opportunity to help make those products a reality by preordering them/donating money to them, do you really think any sizable portion of those people would be interested enough to donate? Of course not.

Most successful Kickstarter and IndieGoGo campaigns have an extremely narrow market, the early adopters of technology. Cancer casts a wider net by several orders of magnitude. There's no reason to think that, with a good viral marketing campaign, something like this couldn't raise several orders of magnitude more money than the most successful crowdfunding campaigns so far.

[korzun]

Only HN somebody will compare cancer drugs to Pebble.

[danielweber]

It's the Galileo Gambit: they laughed at him, they laugh at me, therefore I'll be proven later to be right!

Or,

"The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -- Sagan

[tmuir]

Compare, contrast, whats the difference?

[aangjie]

I would say, contrast focuses only on the difference between the entities being contrasted, while compare can mean, you also focus on the similarities. Not sure, how you use the words, though.

[tmuir]

It was a sarcastic remark. My original comment's gist was that all of the naysayers, at least with respect to the amount of funding required, are basing their analysis on a faulty assumption. So far, we've seen a very narrow niche of people, with very specific interests, fund successful kickstarters on the order of $1,000,000 to $10,000,000. In _contrast_, the demographic of people that would likely be interested in funding cancer research is potentially 1,000 to 10,000 times larger than the 18-35 year old, white American male STEM worker with disposable income and a poor understanding of the realities of electronics manufacturing demographic.

Thus, $1,000,000,000 is not unreasonable at all.

[aangjie]

My Bad. Though, the original comment "compare cancer with Pebble" didn't deserve a reply. Just trolling, you're comparing funding campaign building both, not the experiences of both.