There's a clear problem with the Bitcoin securities market, and that's one of centralisation attracting regulatory problems. BTCT closed down for this reason and BitFunder shut its doors to US citizens for the same reason. In response, the value of these securities has largely artificially been forced down, despite the real practical value the shares may have, due to forced sell-offs by Americans who have lost their means for practical trading of these securities. I'm invested in two of these myself; ActiveMining and LabRat Mining, and both are looking at their own private methods of managing their share/bond allocations, but these are still going to be problematic, because there's still not an easy way for them to be either be discovered by newcomers, or traded back and forth by the existing market.

Guys, Ripple is *perfect* for Bitcoin securities! You can issue your own arbitrary units of value that are tradeable using the Ripple protocol. It's decentralised, so regulatory issues can't get in the way of trading and transacting, and it gives each issuer the power to allocate some arbitrary number of shares and trade them out in exchange for the Bitcoins they need to fund their project. And because they're all managed by the Ripple protocol, you don't have to worry about managing some sort of separate altcoin representing each security.

Finally, for those concerned about XRP being a scam because it's centrally-issued, it's not relevant, because trading XRP is not what's happening here. All XRP would get used for in this case is transaction verification, so that argument is really somewhat irrelevant to this use case.

Would like to hear other people's thoughts on this, as I for one am somewhat upset about the massive unnecessary loss of value that my shares have suffered, all in the face of regulatory fears, when those fears can be completely bypassed by decentralisation, and Ripple provides a perfect vehicle for that to happen.