The current bitasset pegging system is so fantastically complex because the assets are traded on a free market, which can be manipulated by any other market participants.
A neolithically simple alternative way to peg a bit asset to an external price would be to remove the other participants from the equation.
Create a different class of asset, which can only be bought and sold by the issuer. The issuer maintains a buy and sell price with a spread which takes into account adverse selection costs.
Issues:
100% trust is required of the issuer. Trust that they don't sell you the asset and then raise their buy price to $1M USD. Trust that they have enough liquidity to cope with adverse selection costs, so they're able to buy back the assets they sold you after the price goes up.
Now, take that idea and
make the blockchain the issuer.
You then gain 100% transparency on the algorithm controlling the prices. You'd be able to see the 'balance' of the blockchain in advance to be sure it has liquidity reserves.
In addition, bitshares is ideally placed to implement this idea, since the necessary price feeds are already a fundamental component.
The only real remaining issue is designing the algorithm to set the bid/ask prices - perhaps something like the kalman filter (
http://www.r-bloggers.com/the-kalman-filter-for-financial-time-series/) could be used over the feed data.
Thoughts?