Trusted, not necessarily centralized. Having to trust the price feed is an issue, but having to trust the market which can be manipulated is the issue Bitshares will have.
I don't really see an easy answer. I don't have complete faith in the market or in its participants.
It will always be some blend of a set of centralised feeds, though. It could suffer from a similar problem that banks inflict on bitcoin exchanges who use their services - if all the feed providers somehow decide to stop serving data to mastercoin, there is a big problem.
Cheers, Paul.
If by "It" you mean Mastercoin then you are very wrong.
Mastercoin is an open platform. We are developing features blazingly fast.
If we think some form of another of completely trustless asset mechanism is feasible, we will implement it (remember, this was the original motivation for the project!)
Please don't make the mistake of thinking that Mastercoin is one particular feature or another. Mastercoin is a platform.
Whatever good things that our competitors do, we'll shameless copy for the betterment of the world and our users.
Ripper, I appreciate your fair comparison of the two contenders. Ive no stake in neither of them, but I am reading about them trying to figure things out. I have a question about Mastercoin: can the value of a single Mastercoin be so high that somebody that do not own any Mastercoins can not afford to buy assets tied to the Mastercoin?