But wouldn't the companies just buy their rankings instead of getting ranked by real people ?

They would be limited by their budgets, once enough users were in the system.

Also, if one suspected that a firm's managers were trying to buy the love, the Streisand Effect might kick in.

I think the reason most people don't fundamentally understand what Invictus and Ethereum are striving towards is because people don't have the foundational knowledge necessary to even begin understanding.

For instance, people don't grasp/understand or want to accept the the world of money is like a religion and as long as people have 'faith' in something it is accepted as true. Regardless of whether it is rational or not.

If there is a lack of understanding of how traditional banking and monetary institutions work than it makes understanding the significance of your work a little harder to understand. However, people do have a gut feeling that the system is inefficient and that your work holds great promise.

I've been teaching Economics and Finance for the past decade. When I explain  to my students how the Fed creates new USD, the looks of incredulity that I see indicate that this is the first time that anyone has explained it to them.

I have a little box that looks like a treasure chest with poker chips, Dr. Seuss figures, and Monopoly money in it that I use to explain Bitcoin to people. The idea that some D&D geeks breathed value into ephemeral tokens is more than many can accept. To many more, the idea that anything that trades as an asset, including exotic combinations of assets, can be traded as a similarly ephemeral BitAsset is crazy-talk.

When I get animated and start pitching the idea of insuring poor villages in the Developing World by having the villagers take the long side of a bet that they will suffer disaster, and having gamblers worldwide bet that they won't, people back away slowly and avoid making eye contact with me.

It occurs to me at this point, that we are fast approaching the point where we need a typographical system for symbolizing general cryptocurrency concepts, similar to the formal systems used in symbolic logic and cryptography.

Maybe not this, precisely, but something like:

A→B : spend from A to B
A→O : A offers to spend to (i.e., buy from) anyone in the market (bid)
A←O : A offers to receive from (i.e., sell to) anyone in the market (ask)

I'm not sure what the other operators would be, but there are not many atomic concepts that need to be represented in the software. It is in the mixing that the complexity emerges.

An analogy here might be that from electrons, protons, and neutrons, we get elements, then chemistry, then biology, then economics.

Huffington Post ran an article in 2009 that summed up the problem with the public's understanding of economics— "
Priceless: How The Federal Reserve Bought The Economics Profession"—that describes how the Federal Reserve dominates the economics profession in the USA.

Considering that so many tacitly accept that logical fallacies like Appeal to Authority, Appeal to Popular Sentiment, and Appeal to Tradition are the foundation of legislative and judicial systems worldwide, it is not so surprising that a special interest group like the Federal Reserve might hold sway by coopting elite professors at elite universities.

When one questions the received wisdom that mild deflation is worse than mild inflation, it is not uncommon to be on the receiving end of Ad Hominem  that is synonymous with, "Every schoolboy knows...!"

One of the reasons that I switched from economics to finance was to avoid pointless bickering.  In finance the only correct response to an 'analysis' like that found at the end of the OP is to challenge the one making the claims to a public wager. If BitShares does not collapse as predicted, then Legarcon should donate USD 10,000 to a charity that he or she despises.

If one has nothing to lose, should one's powers of prophesy fail, then it is just economics.

To wit:

In fact, although the author claims to be a “self-taught Austrian Economist”, the entire microeconomic foundation of BitShares is incorrect.

The foundation of Austrian School microeconomics consists of methodological individualism (All human action is individual action.), subjective value (inter-personal, intra-personal, and inter-temporal), time preference, and viewing the market as a process (rather than as a dimensionless and instantaneous equilibration)... none of which the author addresses, notwithstanding that for BitShares—or any market—to function, all of these apply.

Fundamentally, BitShares assumes that prices are driven by arbitrageurs, when in fact they are driven by users.

BitShares, being inanimate strings of 1s and 0s, assume nothing. Anthropomorphisms make for engaging fables, but have no place in scientific analysis.

As the author never defines 'arbitrageur' or 'user', it is difficult to know what distinction is being drawn here. As understood by financial economists, arbitrage is the simultaneous buying and selling of an asset on different markets, in order to take advantage of price discrepancies. By selling on markets with relatively high prices, and simultaneously buying the same asset on markets with relatively low prices, arbitrageurs bid the high price down and the low price up, earning zero-cost profits until the arbitrage opportunity vanishes.

In this way, arbitrageurs do drive prices, as do information traders and noise traders.

I am unfamiliar with a market 'user', so I must leave the assertion that prices are driven by users unchallenged.

Arbitrageurs merely perform the simple service of aggregating and cancelling different price offerings, which prevents users from being ripped off.

The phrase 'ripped off' suggests that some 'fair price' exists. However, this is an opinion, as opposed to a fact, and thus irrelevant in this context.

Speculators absorb and transfer risk, brokers call in the order, and janitors cleans the trading floor to prevent slippage. It is not the employees, but the users, who set prices by expressing supply and demand preferences

It is unclear where the janitors and employees fit into this analysis. Again, the author makes no attempt to explain who market 'users' are.

(While short episodes of speculator-control exist, they are defined by their terminal insanity and a subsequent correction to the user-controlled price level).

As the future is unknowable, all transactions are speculative. To assert that one category of trader is  'investors' ('users'?) and another is 'speculators' is to assert that the one group can divine the future, and the other is comprised of mere gamblers who lack the power of prophesy.

If the market offers a price which is “too low”, such as a car for $5, people will buy them to use: to drive, to enjoy the latest car tech, to avoid breakdowns, for their children, or simply because $5 is less than gasoline or oil changes. The homeless could even live in a $5 car.

If the price is 'too low', then why would the sellers sell? Price ceilings that are below the market-clearing price most commonly are mandated by government agents, and not by market participants, and they invariable result in shortages.

If the market set the price of cars to $5,000,000, people would sell them to use that money to buy other things to use.

Who would buy the cars, assuming that the $5 million had approximately the same purchasing power that it would have today? Price floors that are above the market-clearing price most commonly are mandated by government agents, and not by market participants, and they invariable result in unsold surplus goods.

In BitShares, there is no use, only speculation, and so prices can move without bound.

Prices are limited by the resources of the market participants.  For a price to move without bound, one would need at least one participant who had infinite wealth. Even the universe is not infinite.

Even if the BitShares idea were partially valid, the scourge of risk, and well-known effects of Asymmetric Information would iteratively drag the price of all BitAssets to zero, in a phenomenon called ‘The Market for Lemons’.

The phrase 'The Market for Lemons' refers to an economic paper from 1970. Nowhere in that paper does the price fall to zero.

Cars are not fungible, thus some are 'cherries' and others are 'lemons'. For a given BitAsset issue, the opposite is the case. Among BitAssets issues, it might be the case that market participants might hoard 'cherry' BitAssets (as we see today with Bitcoin), but it is a bit of a stretch to predict that no one would circulate them (as we see with Bitcoin, when people use it as money).

The margin call system only increases the fragility of this mysterious experiment, such that the richest or craziest agents could create and profit from immensely volatile price swings.

This is a hypothesis, and not a foregone conclusion. The only way to know is to run the experiment.

If not prevent, at least mitigate.

I am going to start with 0% in the first chain for simplicity, then experiment with alternatives by implementing the interest rate later.   Less things to go wrong in the initial release.

It should be [conceptually] easy to establish a loanable funds market. Consider that the price of an asset can be modeled as a function of the expected future benefit (F), the time that one has to wait for that benefit (t), and the prevailing interest rate (i), such that:

P = F / (1+i)^t

Note that F and t are fixed in the agreement; e.g., "Party A agrees to pay bearer $F t units of time from now.

BitShares determine P through the market process, leaving only i to be determined as the lone unknown.  Basically, set up a market for BitLoans, and i pops out automatically.

In the case of BitAssets they still require fees to be paid in BTS when they are transferred.  When trading on the market some of the bitassets are kept as fees.   This destroys the BitAssets and thus serves as a kind of dividend on bitassets.

This is an elegant solution that gets around taxation issues in jurisdictions that have income taxes.  If you pay a dividend, then that is a taxable event in many places, especially the places where BitShares early adopters live. However, if you burn BitAssets, then no one has receive a direct payment, and the gain takes the form of capital gains.

In places with 0% long-term capital gains, like Germany, this could result in a zero-tax gain for long-term BitAsset holders.