It would be very good to see some kind of original NFD feature going beyond what NXT can do. I think the NXT AE's great weakness is it's centralized trust model (in the issuer of an asset). I still would like to see NFD implement spread betting with a decentralized trust model. Perhaps AT can help with this?
Those are very good points. AT will certainly help with cross-chain transactions. You did hit the nail on the head about having to trust the issuer of an Asset. I've stuck to alias-type Assets myself - full backing by another crypto - in order to set a good example, and (I hope) add to a tradition that would make a scammer stick out like a sore thumb. But, it still hinges upon trust.
Implementing a reasonably trust-free option would require a major overhaul of the core. Unfortunately, we're still stuck in the altcoin underworld: the only experienced and doughty coder who's joined us has been BTC2Nxt for AT.
Spread betting on regular markets opens up another trust issue, as MaWo pointed out earlier. The trouble with using regular market data is that trust is required for the source! No matter how unimpeachable the feed, you still have to trust the feed itself. And regular markets being what they are, plus latency being what it is, there's no exact-match confirm available. Gold can go from $1,261.20 to $1260.70 or $1,261.70 in a millisecond. So if some scammer decides to run a "long con" with a compromised feed that give him just a little edge, it would be all-but-impossible to detect.
As for more obvious cons, they can be detected with "many sets of eyes" - preferably with some straightforward auditing tool which offers a choice of feeds. It wouldn't be that hard to whip up an auditing tool that would catch a scammer who tries to 'settle' a gold bet using $1,500 gold, for example. But again, latency and volatility mean that an exact match is simply not possible. It seems a situation that's ripe for a lot of arguments.
Isn't HFT grand?
In fact, there was an expose on Zero Hedge about a huge gold buy that hit the Chicago market at the exact millisecond when the Fed released a gold-boosting announcement. The truth of the expose hinged upon the speed of light! I'm not kidding. The author said that there was no way that the announcement could have reached someone in Chicago quickly enough for that buy to have been placed
after the announcement came out. He concluded that the buyer had inside information on what the announcement was going to be and pre-programmed his tradebot to buy at the exact millisecond of its release in order to cover his tracks.
As I said, the latency, volatility and consequent trust issues would be a permanent source of arguments.
In this sense, the AE system is a real blessing and the prefect medium for spread betting. Its virtue is its slowness! All orders go into the hopper at the same time, and none of them are good until a forger validates them and adds them to the blockchain. ~90 sec. confirm time means that bets can be settled unambiguously.
But the trouble is, we need more alias type of Assets on the NFD system for spread bets! We'd also need a lot of liquidity, or at the very least a (trusted!) market maker to, say, keep "NFDGold" in line with the real bid and real ask for gold. It's a great idea, but the old catch-22 of the altcoin underworld puts a limit on it. For now.
As for me, I'm doin' what I can.
