This is my belief of how a p2p-exchange can be built, after 2 years of experience with bitcoin, mtgox and all speculators and scammers...
Requirements
It must be 100% open source
Early adaptors must not be rewarded
The dev team should not be greedy, our reward will be fame, not money or coins
Assets and Exchange as two separate projects
Asset Coin
We need to create a new alt-coin for the sake of a public ledger of assets, "AssetCoin"
This coin will use Proof-of-Stake instead of Proof-of-Work to save energy.
The inflation must be high to prevent hoarding, Each contract (coin) should never cost more than 1 cent.
Instead an empty contract can be signed by an issuer with an IOU of an asset, for example BTC-E issues 1 BTC per contract.
The domain assetcoin.org is not free, so we should call it something else.
P2P-exchange
The exchange must be created totally separate from the "AssetCoin", this exchange will run on torrent-data and distributed computing.
Anyone can participate to run an exchange node for a certain exchange, each exchange is totally separate from other exchanges.
All nodes will equally share the transaction fees.
Exchange fees are paid with a certain AssetCoin, for example an IOU of USD issued by Western Union.
As a client you could for example by a USD-IOU on the street and begin to trade on the p2p-exchange and buy GOLD-IOU.
Your assetcoins will always have an intrinsic value, the value is guaranteed by the issuer.
Why not cut out the crypto currency and use mastercard? ;-)
Early adopters need a reason to use it, and if getting rich is that reason, then you must accept that. The alternative is that nobody is going to start using your idea, and it will never take off!
The idea that an assetcoin will always have an intrinsic value is too expensive for words - that is what countries with central banks are able to offer - nobody else is big enough!
Can I be the first to say it will never work? ;-)
I'm not in it for the money so I don't care if it takes off or not.
I think you totally have misunderstood my proposal for an Asset backed coin, so I repeat:
An asset backed coin is actually not a coin but a contract, a digital contract signed by the issuer promising a certain asset or service.
The issuer can be exactly anyone, you, your mom, your friend, a bank, a corporation or a government.
-You could issue these contracts to borrow money from your friends to buy a car, and when you want to pay back they send your issued contracts back so you can terminate them.
-A local community could use this contracts to issue a local currency, just like BerkShares.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BerkShares-A mint could issue contracts backed by gold and promise to physically deliver the gold on request.
-A bank could issue contracts backed by dollars for usage in e-commerce, and take interest on the contracts (the intrinsic value of the contract decreases with X% per year)
Once the contract is issued it can be transferred and stored just like bitcoin.
It is possible that some contracts will default (become worthless), but that's life - it's full of risks and you have to judge the risk of your counter parties.
Getting rid of counter party risk is a nice utopia, but in the real world we have to deal with real people.
I prefer to hold IOUs with 100% intrinsic value where some of them might default over time, rather than buying a crypto currency with 0% intrinsic value.