  We consider the problem of estimating the mean of a symmetric log-concave
distribution under the constraint that only a single bit per sample from this
distribution is available to the estimator. We study the mean squared error as
a function of the sample size (and hence the number of bits). We consider three
settings: first, a centralized setting, where an encoder may release $n$ bits
given a sample of size $n$, and for which there is no asymptotic penalty for
quantization; second, an adaptive setting in which each bit is a function of
the current observation and previously recorded bits, where we show that the
optimal relative efficiency compared to the sample mean is precisely the
efficiency of the median; lastly, we show that in a distributed setting where
each bit is only a function of a local sample, no estimator can achieve optimal
efficiency uniformly over the parameter space. We additionally complement our
results in the adaptive setting by showing that \emph{one} round of adaptivity
is sufficient to achieve optimal mean-square error.
