BitShares

= "described as a ‘predictive market’, in which participants set commodity prices by taking positions – or, put more directly, by placing bets". [1]

URL =

Discussion

David Morris:

"That brings us to one of the current limitations of DACs – the infrastructure connecting them to the larger economy. Though retailers and service providers adopted Bitcoin en masse in 2014, financial servicers have been much more cautious. What this means is that there are still very few ways for users to convert Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies into traditional currencies or commodities.

Partly in order to work around this, the BitShares trading platform offers participants no ownership of the commodities they’re nominally taking positions on. Instead, Larimer describes it as a ‘predictive market’, in which participants set commodity prices by taking positions – or, put more directly, by placing bets. BitShares is, for now, a digital version of the 19th-century bucket shops where the working classes would go to bet on stock‑market moves. This form of speculation is illegal in most US states, including Washington, California and Mississippi. But that could change quickly. As digital cash becomes integrated with more and more services, DACs such as BitShares will almost certainly find ways to interface with real-world markets for gold, dollars and goods of all kinds. If those connections expand, the possibilities of DACs will expand with them." (https://aeon.co/essays/are-we-ready-for-companies-that-run-themselves)