This is a very interesting question, I'm pretty busy for the rest of the weekend, but I'll definitely try to think about this more completely next week. Some very obvious things...

1. POW - It's clear POW or a POW hybrid is the most popular. (Given their success despite massive relative waste.)

2. Distribution - Having distribution that is perceived as very wide and very fair. (This is hard to achieve as sharedrops have shown to always crush price - free money - but other methods might not be wide enough .)

3. Credible Utility or utility prospects - What moves those markets is when a big payment processor or exchange adds them or they develop tools centred around utility. Then of course ideally people do actually start making use of it. (In DGC it was widely used for tipping and sharing, Dash for privacy, BTC gambling and silk road initially etc.)

Auroracoin demonstrated a few concepts at once when it hit a high > $1 Billion

Credibly Utility. It among many presented the idea that the way to get a coin to have genuine utility and widespread use was to bootstrap it within a large existing community, in this case Iceland.
Delayed Distribution.  The distribution that could lead to credible utility would only come at a future date, so people were trading a very limited supply and inflating the price. (Also demonstrated with Ethercoin directly before Ethereum launch.)
Sharedrops don't work well. Once the coins did start getting given away and supply came on the market the price was crushed.

4. A unique selling point - For BTSX it was the idea that a currency could be profitable and not wasteful and that it would have BitAssets.

Good advice here too

That said, I do like the idea of fixed-deposit interest payments in the blockchain. Are there any altcoins that implement this yet?

If not, I think a simple altcoin with interest payments would be easy for people to understand and exciting to both investors and speculators.

Little bit of discussion on this -

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1317065.0

That said, I do like the idea of fixed-deposit interest payments in the blockchain. Are there any altcoins that implement this yet?

If not, I think a simple altcoin with interest payments would be easy for people to understand and exciting to both investors and speculators.

They can only offer that high interest rate because they can print more Rubles to pay the interest, i.e. like Nubits. BitAssets cant do that, it can only offer interest through services provided, i.e. a free exchange of value.

I guess the short would be providing the more Rubles.

I think I'm asking about bonds.

Say a BITRUB12-07-04-2015 bond . . . . the 12% denotes the interest rate, the 07-04-2015, the date of its issue.

If it is destroyed for bitshares on 07-05-2015, bitshares equivalent to 1.01 RUB must be produced (1 months interest)
If it is destroyed for bitshares on 07-04-2016, bitshares equivalent to 1.12 RUB must be produced (12 months interest)

Such an instrument possible in Bitshares?

1. BitShares needs widespread media coverage comparable to the attention that Bitcoin was getting 1 year ago.
2. The only way to get that coverage is to create a huge bubble
3. The only way to get that bubble is through encouraging speculation
4. The only speculators with the funds and cojones to create said bubble are early bitcoin adopters
5. Marketing efforts therefore should be directed initially at wealth bitcoin adopters looking for the cryptocurrency successor.

A good first step is an accessible video explaining that Bitshares is like Bitcoin, but supports BitUSD, has better decentralization, and is self-financing. Something like the original famous 'weusecoins' video.

If you're holding any PTS (Bitshares PTS, formerly ProtoShares) on Cryptsy, I recommend that you withdraw it to your wallet now.

There's an upcoming mandatory fork that upgrades PTS from PoW to DPOS that enjoys the broad support of the PTS community.
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=11877.0

Cryptsy has not so far responded to any of the devs or stakeholders as to how it intends to respond to the upgrade.

Considering previous form regarding distributions and lack of support for DPOS assets, there is a high risk that Crypsty won't support users in the transition and that users will lose their PTS.

The valuation date for the upgrade takes place on the 14th of December. However, the PTS network has slowed to a crawl, sometimes seeing only 1 block a day so I recommend placing the withdrawal order ASAP.

Cross Posted:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=887402.msg9784953