This project is already asking people to accept many separate significant sources of uncertainty at once:

1] The "economic experiment" (that BitAssets will track real assets, which I personally don't believe in at all).
2] The economic model of this experiment (which I also don't believe in, as shorts have asymmetric fragility and inferior optionality).
3] Software/technical bugs (which have interfered even with Bitcoin [written by many programming geniuses] several times over its history).
4] Market response (Will a critical mass of merchants care bout this? Will a critical mass of traders use this?).
5] Other (legal response, competition, forking the project, theft/poaching/organizational decay).

However, on top of that, you are adding [6] a completely new consensus mechanism, "delegated proof of stake", which is less than 2 months old? Have any big names in cryptocoin security, eg Gmaxwell or andytoshi, endorsed this mechanism? Have any third-parties (ie, not positive bias, cognitive-dissonance fueled I3 investors) endorsed the mechanism? Have any notable people commented on it at all?

Worse, still, will there be Something New two months from now? Something that is even less understood and tested?

Why doesn't anyone else care about this?

I am not an investor in Bitshares, but I would like to see something in Bitcoin 2.0 space succeed. Surely it would be wiser to stick to an idea which already exists, yet is struggling to maintain trust or vitality (like e-gold), and start small by blockchaining it in as similar a way as possible. Take an existing service, like Dropbox (not like insurance or lending, which require complex and novel customer service and human input, nor something like Music-distribution which really isn't an industry at all anymore), and just copy it by changing as few things about Bitcoin as possible. Even this is likely to be impossibly risky and technical.

I'm sorry to say that it is my opinion that a great deal of money and talent will go to waste here. I can't imagine this project succeeding (ie running for 1 year without significant economic or technical problems), without more than a year of testing.

Pick a smaller project!

In the current BitSharesX design:

1] Trading occurs in a centralized market somewhere (although price discovery / trading activities are distributed, the NYSE / CME / etc. are centralized).
2] This trading[1] produces information, namely a market price.
3] This price[2] is used (for trades, settlement, margin calls) in BitSharesX.

BitSharesX seems to need [2] like a plant needs water.  Does it?

What would happen if BitSharesX trading volume / value-storage grew to exceed or replace that of the public gold market? What would BTS traders use to establish the price of gold? If individuals disagreed with the price and began trading a new price, how would BitSharesX learn about this? Say, for example, gold miners selling Gold at a low price to a distributor, who ships gold to US markets where it is sold at a higher price. NYSE prices for gold assume the option to pick up the gold at (for example) a New York Exchange approved vault, standardizing the grade and location. BitGold would be digital, though, so which location's price would be used in this case?

What if all traders "waited to see what other traders decide to do"? What other strange phenomena might we expect at 50%, 51%, 100% replacement?