Actually initially i thought the best usecase for
bitshares was to somehow incorporate the merge of features or voting for delegates
based on prediction markets. It might help in more natural selection process leading to faster and
better innovation.
Since we already can vote all it is is putting incentives in place to actually vote.
Its often cited that Prediction Markets were used in Fortune 500 corporations such as Google and GE to name a few. But what fails to come through is that these programs were quickly dismantled and are no longer in service because of how effective they were in project management. It became embarrassing how pin-point accurate other teams were at judging another department's work and their progress. (They had simple questions such as will team ABC finish their workout program by the end of Q1.) The other employees could make quick work of whether another team was going to succeed or fail and it put that team under more scrutiny. Within that scope of the experiment, PM's became Key Performance Indicators for how well managers and chief officers were doing at their jobs.
CEO's observed that information that was being siloed at the top was being squeezed and disseminated throughout the organization, calling into question the strategic moves they were making. Chief Officers are in positions of decision making because they hold informational secrets that are not beholden to the rest and are trusted to act on that information. If the company evaluate actions itself without that one person, why was their job needed in the first place? So in order to preserve confidentiality, the programs were closed down.
I agree with you that for a flat organizational structure like a DAC, a Prediction Market Model is a key innovation for implementing self-organization. Right now we are in the infancy of accounting for delegates. I've seen some frustration with Blackwavelabs for the lack of communication, resulting in their firing and this has inspired others to demand Delegate Reports from the Delegates themselves. Its a necessary step, but the fact remains, not all of us will read through 101 Delegate Reports every quarter, and as stakeholders we won't always be able to make the optimal votes for BTS just based on Delegate Reports. There will be extraneous information posted on forums, on twitter feeds, on news articles that we will all never be able to get to. There is just not enough time in the world.
The simplicity of internal PM's is that it aggregate all public information. As a result, in this financial poll that is not linked to votes, we will be able to discern through bad and good delegates quickly.
It solves a lot of problems for us, so yes I'm a little shocked that there as been little effort around Prediction Markets. Its so closely aligned to our visionary message and at some point we will have to use PM's in this regard. Will Delegate A be fired by Dec 12, 20XX? Will Delegate B succeed in their advertising campaign and bringing in 20K new users? Will a working hardware wallet for BTS reach the hands of consumers by 2016? I think having questions like this and on other subjects around us is exciting and fun. It would certainly help bring attention and that critical mass.
By the time we get to this, both Ethereum and Truthcoin would have already had their versions out.