Let's take Google. The share price of Google is supposed to be their book value plus some fudging for revenue, growth potential, etc. It's why share-price/book is a key stat that tries to guess how much intangible value pushing the price above or below book is correct.
Yes but owning a piece of Google stock means that you have voting rights in the company, it means that if Google were to ever be sold(not going to happen any time soon..), you'd earn a percentage of the sale. You actually own a piece of google. Otherwise, the stock would be valueless.
The way I, and I think most rationale investors will see BitUSD is like this, a few companies are planning on issuing NxtUSD assets on the Nxt AE any day now. They will hold on to USD to back every asset. This means 1 NxtUSD = $1 because at any time you can give back the NxtUSD and they'll give you USD in the process. Now imagine that they got robbed or someone emptied the bank account and ran away. Now the USD backing NxtUSD is missing.. surely you can't still say that NxtUSD is worth $1 is you can't redeem it for a dollar, right? This is exactly what BitUSD is going to be, except you're starting off with a pre-robbed bank.
You guys are using fancy words and trying to justify it but what it really all comes down is that you are trying to convince people that nothing has value. This isn't like a crypto that is a currency in and of itself and USD isn't great but at least there is a limited supply.
I do like that the currency is created via shorting but still the way I see it going is this: I just don't see it having $1 in value as no one will be willing to pay more than $1 for it, and those who short it will be doing it because they believe it'll go up to one dollar and are in it for the money.. so maybe it'll have a value of $0.95.. and stay around that value.. until people realize the value is actually $0.95.. so people will only be willing to short if it goes down to $0.90... same thing and it goes down to $0.85.. then people realize it doesn't work and it collapses.
There is something to the idea, and though I am very skeptical, I hope it works. All I'm saying is.. be very cautious when it comes to these 'market-pegged' assets, you short too much and you could lose a lot of money in the process.