I was reading Bitfinex's explanation of margin trading:
https://www.bitfinex.com/pages/howitworks

And its totally doable inside a blockchain. Owners of BitBTC or BitUSD can lend it out as liquidity providers to traders, who borrow those funds to trade on the internal exchange with margin. Liquidity providing is a great low-risk income stream if you prefer not to trade.

Bitfinex's unique feature of margin trading is probably why its the number 1 biggest Bitcoin exchange right now. Its a killer feature. Add it to the BitShares blockchain with all the extra security benefits that brings, wait for their inevitable Goxing and its moontime for BTS, as long as we have a nice lightweight client by then.

Thanks for the suggestions guys. There's actually loads of options to choose, all of which are great for us. Ive written my email and sent that great TV episode as well as http://bitsharesblocks.com/assets/market which shows how much buzzing activity there is. Fingers crossed.

OMG Jake if you can make a hardware wallet for BitShares then my BitUSD is coming your way 

How's this for a release date: http://bitshares.org

Its a bit of a stretch I know but here goes:

I saw your link and based on bitshares.org's great reputation I agreed to click on it. As a result it attempted to install a cookie on my browser from a 3rd party, which like you said will try to track me when I go elsewhere and serve me more ads. I didnt consent to that 3rd party when I clicked on your link, and I would like to think that 99% of everyone else wouldnt consent to it if they actually understood what 3rd party cookies do. Being harvested into databases that correlate all my web visits definitely sounds like violence to me.

The fact that tracking is so widespread means our tools and browsers dont yet make it easy to defend against. Maidsafe's solution to this IIUC is to just kill the server entirely (yes please), and have all web content shredded up and distributed from nodes on an anonymous bitcloud. You mentioned them briefly in your blog a few posts back and said that they have no understanding of economics (IIRC), which seemed to me to be missing the point if they have a solution to pervasive web-tracking.

Surely life, liberty and happiness means web privacy and not just financial privacy?

It's because a reversible transaction is equivalent to a slow normal transaction. At best, bter could make a thing that says "we see your incoming transaction", but then the user is still responsible for noticing the lack of a signal and triggering the reversal. Meanwhile everyone else suffers slow transactions, or we make it optional and then nobody would choose to support it.

Yes make it optional and then make the client recommend (with a dialog box) that a newbie user uses that feature. At least the client itself would support it by showing a countdown to irreversibility. Anyway youve probably thought about this already.

I think we should keep a running tally of how much the scammer has won - how much did your brother-in-law lose?

I'm gonna get shot down for this... but this is yet another case where bitshares could benefit from having reversible transactions.

You could set a block target for when the transaction was spendable (like an uncleared balance in a bank), and up to that block the transaction could be reversed by the sender.

I think this is a really good idea . By having a pending transaction feature, the real Bter could confirm on the deposit page that he has an incoming deposit. Users would expect to see this notice when they send to Bter. If they dont see anything after a while it gives them a chance to realise that they made a mistake and thereby reverse the transaction.