In case you have not heard about BitShares before, read this article:
http://www.coindesk.com/bitshares-p2p-trading-platform-to-offer-dividends-on-bitcoins/BitShares is the most important project I have seen in a while. Shortly, it combines the power of bitmessage and namecoin with a p2p exchange.
I am fascinated by the huge amounts of improvement this is going to give everyone in the bitcoin community. If used correctly you will be able to mine names aka identity, just like namecoin except that it won't cost the end user anything. Namecoin is just domain names, this will be an identity you can sign in everywhere with and it will be absolutley free.
The Project Quixote will not only give the end user an identity that can be used everywhere on the internet, but as well a secure messaging system that should be as easy as mail. Who bothers to use GPG?
Of course everything will be open source and decentralized, or else I would not even talk about this.
It has recieved VC funding and it will not be premined, instead the VC funding will setup to mine the BitShares from start.
The suggestion is that mcxNOW should be welcoming BitShares to be fully integrated into the next big update. We all love innovative stuff just like Primecoin and this is just the next big thing to hit the community.
The Project Quixote is not done yet but I encourage realsolid and other developers to check out the Bitcointalk thread that was #1 most discussed on the forum before it was moved to another subforum that doesn't get much attention.
The bitcointalk thread:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/announce-project-quixote-bitshares-bitnames-and-bitmessage-279771