I am still failing to see investment value here.
What is stopping someone from copying the source code, then launching their own chain? Voting is based on districts/geographical areas. The fact that Bitshares users are spread across the globe gives no geographic monopoly. There are no global elections. So this doesn't seem practical unless you are going to do surveys.
This is how I see blockchain tech combining with voting:
Every election will have to be a new chainlike btsx. Whether it's your local city or county, up to countrywide elections.
This new chain will have opposing candidates listed in place of an assets. Instead of bitGold, you have Romney/Obama token as an "asset". Then another would be prop. XXX as an "asset".
Each registered voter in that jurisdiction or district will be assigned an address in the genesis block with 1token of each "asset"
They will then send each token to the candidates specified address. i.e. you send your Romney/Obama token to Obama's public address. You send your propXXX to the Yes address or vice versa and so on.
Not sure TITAN would work for this. It would have to be open and visible.
The majority of the work is in validating users... as the network grows the number of validated users grows and *THIS* is where the value is. A new chain would have no validated users.
I'm not sure if that is true. I mean, I agree that the majority of the work is in validating users, but a cloned Vote DAC could always piggyback off the hard work of the account validators, assuming they trust the validators. I don't think there is any lock-in network effect in the DAC. The network effect is in the validator, which is a centralized firm.
And frankly, it may not be so horrible if there isn't any lock-in effect in the DAC. I rather have the fixed cost of validation be made useful on as many Vote DAC clones as possible. Cloning the DAC will allow for maximum scalability. If transaction costs get too high on one DAC, just clone it and reduce the transaction burden. The transaction fees will obviously need to be high enough to motivate delegates to operate the network in the first place (pay their computing costs and give a decent enough profit to make it worth their time), but I think the lack of network effect would reduce the profit margin of this DAC to near zero.
The only issues are funding development and marketing. Hopefully the inflation model can sustain that enough until it succeeds. If we can manage that, then it doesn't matter if this doesn't become a high market cap DAC. It would still be sustainable. It would have low transaction fees so that voting isn't expensive. Users would likely have to cover the costs of their own validation, which then becomes public information. And it would still be an incredibly useful tool for society.