There are many difference between here the bank and Bitshare system, the bank issued USD notes with nominate price and it will honor its IOUs, but how about BitUSD? Its price will be solely determined by the market force and how can you say it will track the real USD?
This is a valid concern, but seems to have been addressed by academic examination:
http://forecastingprinciples.com/files/Berg_Nelson_Rietz_2007.pdfhttp://hanson.gmu.edu/promisepredmkt.pdfhttp://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/33261/1/510931871.pdfThe core idea of the BitShares exchange is to create an environment where one can establish a global price for an asset, commodity, idea or venture in relation to a store of value that is divorced from politics or geography. Once these stores are convertible to fiat or other cryptocurrencies, then from historical inference, we project prices will track well.
I don’t think BitUSD can track real USD only because of market force unless some connection between BitUSD and real USD is built, market is such a world that many factors have impact on BitUSD/USD exchange rate, most probably the BitUSD/USD exchange rate will behave like bitcoin/usd rate –it will go up and down without a stable equilibrium.
But can we place legitimate credence on the
accuracy of FX prices, which are determined solely through competition in a play-money market game? To an extent, yes. We find that FX prices strongly correlate with observed outcome frequencies
http://artificialmarkets.com/am/pennock-2001-science.pdfIn another word, why should BitUSD track USD and BitGold track gold? Can their name lead to a market consensus?
Yes. Simplicity is simply the best answer here. The name and market consensus about the concept in question should be sufficient.
To enable BitUSD track USD, market makers is needed at the early phase, the market maker can do something like to sign a contract with some estore to purchase their BitUSD at a proper price, or even provide futures contracts to stabilize the price of BitUSD, some time later when a stable connection between BitUSD and USD has been built the market maker can escape and we can still expect the track relationship remains.
You may be right about bootstrapping via market makers and this is something we can explore via data from the testnet when available. BitShares- like bitcoin- is an experiment that we are very excited to conduct and learn from. We are working with an algorithmic trader on Wall Street and a quant from England to both design tests and interpret the data generated. We will also be offering bounties to see if actors in the testnet can compromise the integrity of our system.
The key is to understand the goal first, which is using the technology inspired by Bitcoin to create a prediction market based pricing engine for anything that is global and divorced from the concerns of nations. We think BitShares as written represents a very good start towards that goal, but it will require a lot of effort to systematically test and deploy a polished, academically vetted product.