The potential is there for this vision to occur, no question. The scariest thing for me is governance. With all the great work that I3 and the independent DAC developers have done, there hasn't been much of a focus yet (at least not a visible one!) on delegates and decision-making. I'm not saying they haven't thought of this, but most efforts have been in other areas, understandably.
Obviously, the worst case scenario is that some bad interest gains enough voting power to take over the whole thing.
Another really lousy scenario is that delegate campaigning ends up as a money race. Building name recognition requires advertising, etc., and it all gets out of hand. In other words, becoming a delegate becomes out-of-reach for the average person, rather like getting elected to the U.S. Congress. Try as we might, can we develop something that functions better than a U.S. election, where (I think most of us believe) the politicians say whatever we want to hear, but are bought-and-paid-for by moneyed interests?
Keeping things free and open is good. Restrictions should be minimal. I am absolutely opposed to any term limits, for instance, which have turned out to be the best friend of special interest groups. And there's no way I'd automatically fire (term out) a dedicated developer who has chosen to make this a career. Delegates, whether they be individuals or someday become FOrtune 500 companies that employ armies of devs, marketers, and the like, will only get my vote if they remember this is a public service.
What we really need is a good place for decision-making. Maybe that's the forum or maybe not. Are we comfortable using these threads to advance a proposition? For example, Delegate 68 proposes that we buy a large insurance company and turn it into a DAC. Does Delegate 68 just start a new thread with that proposal? Is that good enough for us? Maybe so.
Are we going to get spammed with proposals from delegates? Would it make sense to limit a delegate to a certain # of new election propositions each year?
If we build it, will they vote? In the current beta version of BitShares X, the voting mechanism is terrible. I'm sure it has taken a lot of thought and work so far, and I thank those who have created it. This thing really is revolutionary. But it's clunky and it needs to be far more functional.
Voting should be a high priority with the user interface. If we're making decisions, we'll need more than 9.5% support, 8% of which is probably AGS and I3 shares. Currently, that's enough to elect a delegate. I know it's a poor example, because delegate votes are so split; what I really need to use is participation/turnout rate, but I don't have access to that (though I've heard secondhand that it's quite low). I also wonder if there should be a dialog box that opens to announce a new proposition for voting or a running ticker with governance news, etc., somewhere in there.
Going forward, the governance will only work and we'll only be able to sell this idea, if there is strong participation in voting and governance. This has been a great start. There's far more work to be done in that area. Very exciting...and scary.