RE: Will HERO work? Or, can you brute-force the free market?
I still think we have a valid financial product.
Absolutely, I agree. HERO will be a fascinating experiment. I write what I write because I haven't seen anybody else writing it (other than in your replies to my posts), and your enthusiasm needs a counterweight.
For what it's worth, I think you should launch another one soon after you launch HERO. Call the new one SUPERHERO, and price-feed it to double annually. With HERO, maybe 5% is low enough that you'll actually get it to track 5% pretty well. With SUPERHERO, 100% is totally obviously way too high - so you'd end up with it trading at a huge premium to the price feed. It would be really interesting to see how its volatility, effective rate of return, and popularity would compare to HERO.
I'm serious about this - I think it would be an extremely valuable experiment.
I encourage folks to experiment, but I personally have only one mission: Doing things to grow BitShares to be all that it can be. We paid the price to start the HERO because I believe it can drive demand for BTS and therefore grow its price and attract attention and liquidity to our ecosystem.