Quote from: btcmind on September 11, 2013, 06:00:33 PM

I find it certainly valuable in this direction. You're talking about Swaps or a betting market, not an asset exchange. Somebody with a background in finance will not understand this.

Quite generally you can't base an economy on swaps. Say a company wants to raise money, i.e. sell stock on the market. That's what stock markets are there for in the first place. With swaps you don't real price discovery, but the price tracks the real market, but not very well in the short term. You also don't earn any dividends.

In my opinion, which differs quite a bit from the proposal, there might be some breakthroughs possible by having new types of contracts and negotiations. How this might work I don't know, but the problems are all matter of the law. In terms of actually building an alternative financial system, I think that's quite far away. You really want an exchange to be efficient, which is not possible with a blockchain. IMO you need other types of intermediation, which allow millions of tx's / hour or second or microsecond. Or you could have new types of auction mechanisms.

Where we agree is that looking at cross-exchange issues is important. For example, say it would be almost free to operate an exchange, and all exchanges are interconnected through APIs (and market models). Then the system will be populated by arbitrageurs. This is how the FX market works today. The futures and stock market has a very different structure. FX is OTC but still very performant. Nobody owns the FX market - it is a interbank network.

Could you please substantiate 'not very well in the short term'.

Dividends earned here are not from the underlying asset, but from the exchange itself. So dividends paid have nothing to do with the dividends paid by a real company on the actual stock.