A few remarks / questions. Forgive my bad English.
BitShares requires a global ledger that establishes the order of transfers, bids, asks, and market trades. Every 5 minutes the set of all bids and asks included in the previous block are deterministically matched.
Do I wait 5 minutes to get my buy or sell order visible in the ladder (not ledger)?
It would work like a bitcoin transaction. You can either negotiate the trade entirely 'off chain' and then just publish the atomic transaction, or you can place an open order into the block chain. Your open order will show up as an 'unconfirmed transaction' as fast as it can be broadcast and could be matched by the miner the very next block.
Canceling an open order is also subject to the 24 hour rule because a chain reorganization after you placed your order but before you canceled it could result in another miner executing your order.
So, no ''good till cancelled'' orders?
All orders are good until you cancel them. The sentence you quoted relates to the fact that decisions made by miners are tied to the block and thus cannot be ported over to new chains.
Local ‘Deposit’
Grandma wants to earn a 10% return on her dollars, but is unable to use a computer. Her grandson decides to help her out, so he receives the dollars from his grandmother and then uses them to buy BitUSD.
Why not treat grandson's account as a ''master account'' (probably all forex brokers offer trading through master account - trades are allocated to sub-accounts) through which the grandson can perform specific (and limited) operations on the grandma's ''sub-account''. This will effectively render scams like Pirate40 impossible.
The key with this example was to show that Grandma doesn't even need a computer and can benefit from the system using a trusted (but decentralized) 3rd party.
Speculator with LeverageIt would be interesting to see what leverage ratios will evolve
Everything is at least 100% collateralized, so there are no leverage ratios in the traditional 'fractional reserve' manner. In this case he was going short to yield a higher return (with higher risk) to leverage his bet that BitShares will go up relative to BitUSD. So there will be return rations, but the minimal backing for a short position is 150% and due to market forces, the maximum backing will probably be no more than 250%.
