Hello all, I wanted to alert you that Peershares vs Bitshares is being discussed on the Bitshares forum:

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=2759

which is what brought me here (my first post!).

Based on what I read in the OP of this thread, I feel confident in stating that the two concepts are vastly different. Bitshares is attempting to accomplish something far, far more ambitious (IMO more speculative) than Peershares. This is not without controversy and I refer anyone interested to several discussions that took place on bitcointalk last fall:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279771.msg3214589#msg3214589

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279771.msg3036037#msg3036037

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279771.msg3282870#msg3282870

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=423000.msg4621908#msg4621908

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=325425.msg3610353#msg3610353

One of the issues is whether Bitshares violates the “Impossible Trinity”:

en.wikipedia.org Impossible trinity The impossible trinity (also known as the trilemma) is a concept in international economics which states that it is impossible to have all three of the following at the same time: It is both a hypothesis based on the uncovered interest rate parity condition, and a finding from empirical studies where governments that have tried to simultaneously pursue all three goals have failed. According to the impossible trinity, a central bank can only pursue two of the above-mentioned three policies simul...

Another is that it uses a predictive market, but one in which there is: i) no deliverable (eg commodity or share) and ii) no delivery or settlement date (i.e. it’s at t=infinity). There is no external price feed, so the market is expected to set a consensus fair price. While this may work in theory, I can’t see anything that would have prevented its implementation on a centralized exchange in the past, ie. there’s nothing in the fundamental economics that requires it to be de-centralized. Since the idea of a predictive market has been around for 50+ years, smart financial entrepreneurs must have made the extrapolation (adding the conditions of no deliverable and no termination date) at some point and determined it to be unworkable. For this reason alone, I have skepticism about the Bitshares model and have elected to stay out of it.