I haven't seen anyone in this forum mention the possibility of implementing an insurance company using the technology of the bitcoin blockchain. I don't know how specifically this would work, since the DAC wouldn't be able to assess a clients risk. However if the opportunity cost of pulling money out of the fund were great enough then perhaps clients would not do so except in the case that they actually needed the money for medical reasons. Just throwing the idea out there to get some chatter about it. The distributed technology coincides well with the need of insurance companies to dilute risk over the largest pool of ppl.
Insurance is actually an area I have been carefully thinking about in the background. It is tricky for the reasons you specify, but there are certain kinds of 'general' insurance that is possible.
The key is to avoid any voting or individual specific data. So suppose you wanted to insure against a hurricane hitting your city, you could create a prediction market where the price was tied to the estimated damage caused to city X in month M.
Now suppose you have a house on the coast in X city and you want to insure it against a hurricane, you go to the market and you bet on a hurricane hitting your city every single month. If nothing hits then your position will move toward 0. If a hurricane approaches then it will price will move up toward the estimated damage proportional to the strength of the hurricane. Long after the hurricane people will continue to estimate the damage to the city until a general consensus is reached at which point anyone can cash out and use the profits earned to rebuild.
In this case you make money even if your house isn't destroyed by the hurricane as long as it hits your city. The more insurance you want the earlier you should buy and the more you should buy.
Using this same technique, you can insure against plagues, wars, or even unemployment.
What you cannot insure against is the probability that you *specifically* get cancer, are in a car accident, etc. I think this is what *SAVINGS* is for, general insurance against crap happening to you.
Otherwise the only service a DAC could provide is accounting but it would be unable to evaluate individual claims due to the need to make judgement calls on issues to small to expose to a market and where information is not widely dispersed in society.