Yes, that's one of the basic ways to offer mining shorting. The main problem with this is that it doesn't account for the time value of money. There are some fairly safe deposit programs offering 1%-2% per week. An investor in SHRT will have to tie up his funds for 6 months and not get anything for it. Remember also that the amount tied should be pretty high to guarantee that it's sufficient for the difference.
You could reflect the time value in the price, and actual invest the raised funds to complement the profit, but then you run into fuzziness about what is the actual time value.
If the time spanned is shorter this becomes less of a problem, but then it's much more of a hassle to use the asset.
This is still viable, but not very elegant.
The proper way of course is to have a market which allows selling mining bonds on margin. This way you can exactly mirror the bonds, and you can get pretty good leverage (a larger position per money tied up).
Investing the funds seems like it could be a good way to increase their value. It does introduce some risk, which I'd like to keep as low as possible- but I'd also like these to be worthwhile investments. Which programs would you say are "fairly safe"? Ultimately it would be up to investors, I guess
6 months may be too long... I'll have to think about it- Time moves faster in the Bitcoin world :]
