How do you prevent it being mixed with other coins?
Yes I thought of the same thing yesterday.
It makes the whole a little less elegant.
Which is why I decided that stocks and shares need their own network and protocol designed for that purpouse from the ground up. Bitcoins were designed to represent a single freemarket comodity, in which each node may have shares of the whole. As I understand it, there needs to be another discrete unit of identity information caried by the bitcoin transactions. You would need bitcoin to store the node it belongs to, as well as the comodity/company it represents. Stocks and bonds are essentialy a companys own micro-currency. They are derived from the 'tally-stick', by which shares in a collective asset, could be represented on a completely unique piece of timber, that carried notches to quantify the amount and was split (with the grain providing a unique fingerprint) so that the notches remained on both peices. The company (or government) retained the stock, while the investor kept the bond (or was it the other way around?). Anyhow, you had a unique identifier of the trading entity in the grain of both halves (like public and private keys) and the amount was in the notches. The 'information' of who either half belonged to, was only a product of who held posesion of it. Bitcoin provides a means to identify each node as independent shareholders of in one single commodity 'bitcoin'. To trade in shares of unique commodities, requires an extra factor of information to be stored, to identify the seperate pools of equity and they in turn, need to float in value independantly. That essentialy means having seperate blockchains as far as I can see.