this gives me a theoretical idea for making on ramps, selling securities, accelerating development, in a legal way. I think, as decentralized as bitshares is, there needs to be a centralized on ramp for people to point to. Sort of what coinbase did for bitcoin, red hat & canonical for linux.
someone start a company which will operate an exchange and file for exemption from registration as a national securities exchange with the goal of being an exchange for new crowd funded securities:
http://www.sec.gov/about/forms/form1.pdfThe new company will operate an exchange where real companies can bring them already authorized/sold shares (the new regulation a+ crowdfunding) to list, or potentially IPO shares for crowd funding (underwrite crowd funding). If IPO, the new company is responsible that only authorized investors participate, and the company receives commission for that.
The company receives commissions for listing and running the organization in an SEC-compliant way, bitshares allows for low-cost and rapid transactions. The company should probably also hire consultants from I3. Bitshares holders gain value since securities will be traded in bitUSD, thus tying up collateral, and increased transaction burn rate.
Additionally, the company can run a website where people deposit dollars in their account to buy/sell securities (like etrade). Except the dollars they see are really bitUSD (that is digital assets with the value of $1, just like I see when I log in to my back account, there really isn't a dollar in the bank with my name on it). The company is thus running an on-ramp to bitshares, with bitshares the trading platform back-end. Unlike a full exchange, you just need relationship with a payment processor that can do USD->bitUSD, or USD->BTC then the company itself does BTC->BTS->bitUSD.
Of course, it might just be easier for the exchange to just set up their own site in dollars and make everything centralized... but in this case you're just buying an existing system for free (or at least a lot less than it would cost to make from scratch.) The new company can, but does not need to, buy a significant % of bitshares (heck, for a few million you can pretty much take over bitshares), this way they can hire their own developers on the network/outsource development to the network. If they own a large percentage of the network, they can potentially control security better.
Don't know how it will work if users are semi-anonymous and non-verified, I don't think you can exchange to foreign nationals too... probably some technical issues to be done. Perhaps the company just uses bitshares as its backend and keeps track of all the other stuff in the front end (creates accounts that are hashes of the real accounts on a secure website someone else...)
just a "crazy," circular way of getting stuff done