Brilliant! 

This is an awesome idea in theory - but would be very complex to put in to practice. I would suggest before attempting to take on car or health insurance something much simpler be attempted first to get the ball rolling. Perhaps flight cancellation insurance. Maybe simple term life insurance for a young couple starting a family (although the regulatory hurdles might be daunting.

Or are you thinking of the mutual aid society as being a very small homogeneous group where everyone is known to each other? (a church group, neighborhood benevolent society, etc)?

I intuit as being extremely difficult to start on any large scale.

That's the beauty of it. Once the code is released, let a thousand BitBlossoms bloom.

Fraternities can issue exam insurance for their members. Small-scale international traders can issue vendor or bribe insurance. Gamers can issue orc insurance.

Like Zombo.com, the only limit is your imagination.

More important than the order in which they are released is that people know that DACs are under development.

New York is already writing legislation regulating these coins, exchanges, and software now... beating them to market does not protect it, thats why the legal orders must be in place ahead of time...

Until the statutes and regulations are enacted, it is impossible to know what they will require and what "legal orders must be in place." 

this leaves more legal questions since they are actually calling us "shareholders" in this announcement...

Considering that the product is called 'BitShares' this should be no more problematic than 'Disney Dollars', 'Dollar Rent-a-Car', 'Dollar General' stores, etc., none of which is controlled by the Federal Reserve System or the US Treasury Department.  Likewise, Federal Express is not operated by the Department of Transportation, and Royal Crown Cola is not produced by the House of Windsor.

which brings into question this whole "donation" thing even more (not just legally with the "stockholders/donators", but what about the IRS come tax time, this is taxable income to them)...

Corporate taxes in the USA are paid on profits. Expenses incurred in the development of BitShares, including salaries, travel, and marketing, are subtracted before taxes are calculated.

...this is a huge can of legal worms that could cause the entire value to be expunged by a large lawsuit or FTC investigation... this is what worries me... they are muddying the waters SO much calling things by different names every step of the way as if they are trying to legally sidestep something to create a legal barrier for which they have flat out broken wide open... I wish they would just call the apple an apple... so we can have clarity about buying oranges here...

If it turns out that the term 'shareholder' should be changed to 'BitShareholder', 'stakeholder', 'sponsor', or whatever, Invictus Innovations can issue a clarification.

With regard to donations to for-profit entities, ten minutes of searching online turned these up:

"For-Profit Charity"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For-profit_charity

"For-Profit Charities"
http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/faculty/2006/09/forprofit_chari.html


"Philanthropy Google’s Way: Not the Usual"
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/technology/14google.html

"The Reasons for For-Profit Philanthropy"
http://www.brooklaw.edu/newsandevents/blslawnotes/2010-2009/fall/googleforprofitphilanthropy/page3.aspx


"Five Ways to Realize Profits and Missions"
http://blogs.hbr.org/2009/10/five-ways-to-realize-profits-and-missions/


"Canonical Opens Donations for Ubuntu, Lets You Put Money for a Mobile Version"
http://www.phonearena.com/news/Canonical-opens-donations-for-Ubuntu-lets-you-put-money-for-a-mobile-version_id35383

Apple charges whatever they want, and inexplicably people pay it.   

BitLuxury: The DAC You Cannot Afford

Who do you think it's users will be?

I expect that we will see a progression similar to the adoption of all new technologies.

After the bleeding edge here, BitShares early adopters are likely to be day-trading speculators who see it is yet another sparkly toy to pump-&-dump.

If I can get enough early adopters to embrace my 'entrepreneurs without borders' mindset, we might see post-ISO-4217 issues, like BitGuatemalanLightRoastedArabica, BitJeanJeanRoosevelt's2015SongCollection, BitGhanaHotSauce001, and the like that can be used for international trade, but I expect that the day-traders could become a nuisance by pushing the prices around.

Who will it be marketed for?

Most likely, some kind of consensus will be sought in these threads, mixed with some of the executives' own expectations.

How do you imagine it breaking out of the altcoin micro-niche community?

That's pretty much the name of the game.

Considering that altcoins are empty tokens not meant to represent anything else, other than some imagined improvement on Bitcoin, one could argue that BitShares is categorically different from Bitcoin, and that it is as mistaken to think of it as an altcoin as it is to think of a Bitcoin wallet as a spreadsheet, although both are software that displays numbers.

On the other hand, such distinctions would be as lost on most as the differences among popular music styles today are lost on me, and nothing is to be gained by arguing with prospective users.

BitShares promoters might need to cut their own new path, rather than position BitShares against colored coins, Mastercoin, Open Transactions, Ethereum, et al.

My own expectation is that I can use BitShares to help price goods that are new to the market. Rather than see them as derivatives or even necessarily as bets, I see them as market research. For example, if I released BitHondurasMediumRoastArabica, it would be in the spirit of issuing Kickstarter-style pre-sales and asking prospective buyers what the price per kilogram should be.

The only way to know if this would help break BitShares out of Altcoin Purgatory is to run the experiment.