It seems to be a pretty good consensus here that prediction markets will be a big thing for Bitshares. I agree on a theoretical level, but in practice it's not so simple.
First of all, Augur has a big lead. They have millions of funding. They have a big group of developers and good marketing. So far we have nothing of those.
Question is: if we build the technology, will the funding, devs and users come?
We haven't seen any meaningful interest in building a PM business on top of the Bitshares blockchain. I would consider a team that is serious about PM business to be a requirement for developing it. It's useless to waste scarce resources to a technology that nobody is ready to use yet.
I think you hit the nail on the head. The technology is just half the problem. Understanding the target market is the other half. Every great idea for a potential application requires an industry savvy entrepreneur to lead it.
Want to do gambling? You need a gambling industry expert.
Want to do music? You need a voting member of the Music Academy like Eddie.
Want to run an exchange? You need someone with that experience like Ronny.
Want to make inroads with the banks? You need a Wall Street mogul like Underwood.
Want to do multiplayer games? You need someone with that background, Like Freebieservers.
So we have quite a few business developers incentivized to go recruit more champions from various industries.
Once you have them,
they can raise funds and THEN you can build any specialized support they may need.
Its a long mating dance to recruit such partners and then they need time to rally support, build and market.
And you can't go public about the leads until the dance is done. Even when you have an agreement to announce something, there are no guarantees that any particular partner won't run into roadblocks and delays. It comes with the job of being an entrepreneur.
In the mean time, the folks we've already got will be most successful working in the markets they understand.
This, more than anything, affects the order in which things get developed.