[alexasmyths]

"a bet that the price of ETH will be above X at Y date and time"

Not so fast. Who says 'what the price of ETH' is? There is no such thing as 'the price of ETH' - there are simply buyers and sellers each willing to sell and buy at different amounts.

You'd have to agree on a mechanism to agree on what that price even is.

And what about odd fluxuations? Market cheaters - i.e. getting a hold of a vast quantity of ETH just to jolt markets for a few hundred milliseconds just to jigger some contract?

As far as 'paying out on delayed flights' - that's a very cool idea, but I can't imagine why on earth it would be in ETH on a distributed ledger.