Hopefully there will be lots of entrepreneurs bringing other ideas they believe in to the BitShares platform and pouring their energy and resources into making them happen. In general, we will not see everything in it that they see, so we will always be unqualified to assess the full merits (unless they need to reveal enough to raise funds from us.)
We need as a community to resist the urge to throw cold water on every idea that shows up. That does nothing to encourage other entrepreneurs to join us. New businesses adopting our platform will be its lifeblood from now on. Let's try to think positive.
Yeah, I try not to be too negative on projects like this. But I just don't see "the secret sauce" here.
And also I like to write down my predictions and reasoning behind them. I can later check if I was right and tune my mental models if I was wrong.
Few words about target audiences...
1. Those who are accused of possessing illegal substances but have not actually harmed anyone
2. Those who are accused of traffic violations for behavior that did not harm anyone
3. Those who are accused of copyright violation
4. Those who are accused of participating in prostitution that did not harm anyone and where no children are involved.
5. Those who have their assets seized
2: Personally I wouldn't like to insurance people who drive recklessly and get fines. Very often they have deserved that.
3: Problems of intellectual property are very close to my heart, but I don't think an insurance will be very effective on that. It might even encourage the copyright mafia to extort more money from alleged pirates. If somebody is a member of insurance fund, he is an easy target because he will propably pay and not fight back.
I think most effective way would be to develop better, easier to use and more anonymous file sharing technology.
1&4: While I do not want to keep these criminalized, I have to say that these kind of behaviors are usually used for short term hedonistic purposes that don't bring much overall happiness to people.
Libertarians usually fail to admit that there should be a culture that will moderate the use of recreational drugs. If there is no law to prevent excessive use, there should be a culture that mandates other people to take care of those who are prone to the temptations of short term hedonistic pleasure.
I would rather see secret clubs for responsible drug users (make sure quality is good, take care of set & setting, etc.) and polyamoric relationships, swingers clubs, etc. for people wanting to have more sex than an insurance for random people who can behave however reckless they want with these substances and services.
And do you think that there will be lots of customers who are willing to provide evidence for a large group of total strangers to be carefully investigated that they got in trouble with hookers and cocaine after a wild night?
5: Unnecessary asset seizures are a big problem in USA, am I right? So this wouldn't be a big hit internationally, but I've heard that people really don't like how cops steal their property without any legitimate reason. This might be the best case for insurance and it wont even be too much controversial. Lots of people will love it and not many can seriously claim that police should have a right to rob people as they want.