A marketing idea? Whitepaper? Strategy? request? Either way I think its is gold.

[BunkerChainLabs-DataSecurityNode]

I would suggest a simplified and softened version with no protocol level enforcement.

Currently the minimum fee is 0.1 BTS and the default is 0.5.  Some of the light wallets are already boosting this fee slightly to pay for their development.  I suggest that some wallets could support defaulting to add an additional 0.1-0.5 BTS fee for every transaction, payed to the account that payed the registration fee for that wallet installations first account.  The idea here is that our grassroots marketers introduce people to BitShares, set up their wallets and register them, and receive transaction fees until the new user either stops using the network or changes the default settings.

This way there's no controversial protocol level enforcement pushed by the network as a whole, and marketers are incentivized to get legitimate users, because they're only rewarded if the user transacts.

I been watching this thread.. Finally saw one comment close to what I thought was an acceptable method.

The initial proposal has serious problems. I have run multiple affiliate programs and spent a few years as an affiliate marketing a while back.. and yeah.. even had a good dig into MLMs for a number of years... one thing I took away from it all was that often times the programs were designed in theory to be good but took the human element totally the wrong way... people just don't understand it until they really get some experience.

The quote above is close to what kind of program would be very decent. We want long term, loyal, real users. The proposed program of the OP and variations following revolves around instant gratification and get rich quick.. the sign up fee is completely unacceptable. I understand the deterrent to keep bogus accounts out etc.. which is why the reward should be based on transaction fees for a period of time or for life. A high transaction trader could be worth hundreds to someone who refers them.. I also think you have to be very careful with how much of the fees you pass on through this.. otherwise the appropriate margin for marketing which for any company should not exceed 10% will become a huge burden to the ecosystem.

Personally I think the programmable wallet with the fee split is the way to go.. just have a clear mechanism that allows 3rd parties to implement such programs. Leave it to a 3rd party affiliate marketer/network operator to deal with all the headaches of managing everyone and keeping the network going (and believe me.. there are many) to make their money.. they know what they are doing.. standards are set... and accessing other networks with the opportunity can be done effectively.

As for everyone else getting nasty about this.. remember it was just a member of the community.. a delegate.. who is sharing an idea to help grow the community.. if you don't like it that's fine.. don't need to get rude about it.

[bitmarket]

Heads Up

The world’s first virtual currency focused multi-level marketing company is preparing to launch on April 1, 2015

http://thebitcoinnews.com/2015/03/25/the-worlds-first-virtual-currency-focused-multi-level-marketing-company-is-preparing-to-launch-on-april-1-2015/

Two points I Would like to make about this.

1. From discussions I have had MLM'ers would love to get involved in crypto. They see it as the next big thing and want a chance to get to work making it big and making a good buckon the way.  That is why this hoax of program will probably work.
2. This program is a hoax and is why MLM's get a bad name.  because the bitcoin protocol will not change to share fees,  companies create "An educational system"  Pay X per month and learn about bitcoin.  The product then becomes educational but the use or non use of bitcoin become irrelevant to the sellers.

That is why what I am proposing is so powerful. I am unaware of any of MLM that is a one time entry fee.  Most if not all rely on subscriptions. Stop paying the subscription lose your income producing ability.  I think sharing the upfront one time $20 is important to properly reward people for their work and fund their advertising in real time.  But the compensation plan should make it clear that the big money is in people actually using the product to make payments for things. (Hence my 20 year timeline.) The big money has to be in fees for product use.  The $20 is just survival money. At such a low one time fee how can anyone complain? Of course they will because haters gonna hate, but not in serious numbers.

[onceuponatime]

Heads Up

The world’s first virtual currency focused multi-level marketing company is preparing to launch on April 1, 2015

http://thebitcoinnews.com/2015/03/25/the-worlds-first-virtual-currency-focused-multi-level-marketing-company-is-preparing-to-launch-on-april-1-2015/

[bitmarket]

First I would like to acknowledge that there is no doubt a stigma to MLM. Further I agree that we will get shit for this if we decided to move forward on it in any form. Single tier or multi tier.  High Earner status fee/low fee / no fee.   We have already seen all of that in this thread already.   I recognize this, like all actions have risk.  The more aggressive we are the more shit we get and potentially the better the benefits.

The bad thing about any change is that if/when the change upsets some existing users, then they may leave. this happens immediately. Any benefit that may accrue from an action does so in the future.  This is true of all actions we can choose to take.  The assessment of the benefits and risks are important and this thread is doing a great job of it so far.

Just my thoughts, but I think the probability of this strategy doing more harm than good in the bitcoin space is substantial. By substantial I would say 30-50%  I think the benefits in the broader community though would be epic.  For this reason I think a high quality phone app is important for the release of this product.

On to a few replies....

BTS is already supposed to be a system where you buy in as an early investor by purchasing BTS, and then you get a dividend from market trading fees, in the form of having BTS be burned. 

But under the new proposed system, instead of encouraging people to buy $20 of BTS and supporting the share price, they are instead asked to put that $20 into a pyramid scheme operating within BTS.  Hilarious!  Its a way to dilute the potential revenues of BTS holders, thus making BTS worth less, in order to reward early participants in the new scheme.

There is so many things wrong with this post I don't know where to start.  The crypto is a place for rich people. you need serious money to invest in coins, mining hardware or have access to capital markets to raise money for a new venture.   If you are poor, move along.... Your hard work is not rewarded anywhere in crypto.  This proposal is the first mechanism in all of crypto that poor people can use sweat equity to ad value to a blockchain and get rewarded. Sounds a hell of a lot more egalitarian to me than just a place for people with investment dollars. A whole new realm of people... the ones who need it the most can participate in the crypto revolution with this marketing system.  And we would have a monopoly on it. 

Further this system dilutes revenues only in the revenues that are created by the participants.   People who do not have a referrer ie: the ones we would have got anyway through word of mouth have 100% of their fees go to the shareholders.

In a pyramid early adopters are rewarded.  In an MLM hard workes are rewarded.  It is up to us to choose the compensation plan that would reward hard work and not incentivize free loaders.

The question/fear I have is:

Do we trade immediate MLM-driven adoption for long term stigma and lower long-run number of users we are likely to see once that MLM label sticks?

Can you convince us that the fear is irrational or at least very unlikely?

Do you have any examples of successful businesses that have started MLM and weened off of it without the stigma of Amway, Mary Kay, Avon, etc.?

The stigma I Agree with, but I disagree that we will sacrifice anything in the long term total number of customers.   Entry into the business is voluntary and should not cost us customers.  Stigma may cost us some business relationships early, but not in the long run.

Once you go down this road it is poor form to turn it off.  If it works you would never want to.  If it does not work and you want to abandon it  you have a difficult situation... People paid $20 to be an earner and be able to sign up earners.   Even letting existing users stay but take away there ability earn a comm from the $20 sign up will not be taken well unless it was stated up front that after x number of signups no more can exist. But I don' think this is that good an idea.

Is the $20 fee to be part of the scheme really needed? If a user signs up a new account referring to his own old account to get half his fees back, then so what? He his still paying the network something.

From the networks point of view it is fine, but from the person who introduced him gets nothing and so he is not incentivized to do any work.

[Troglodactyl]

I would suggest a simplified and softened version with no protocol level enforcement.

Currently the minimum fee is 0.1 BTS and the default is 0.5.  Some of the light wallets are already boosting this fee slightly to pay for their development.  I suggest that some wallets could support defaulting to add an additional 0.1-0.5 BTS fee for every transaction, payed to the account that payed the registration fee for that wallet installations first account.  The idea here is that our grassroots marketers introduce people to BitShares, set up their wallets and register them, and receive transaction fees until the new user either stops using the network or changes the default settings.

This way there's no controversial protocol level enforcement pushed by the network as a whole, and marketers are incentivized to get legitimate users, because they're only rewarded if the user transacts.

[Geneko]

I apologies to OP if this goes slightly off topic but to me this incentive only shows that Bitshares has serious trouble with Marketing. It may be good idea for attracting more people but are the people that could be attracted like this the ones that Bitshares want to attract? What is the basic strategy behind this? Are those people the ones that would recognize the benefit of investing in BitUSD or UIA. Does these people really need any feature of Bitshares beside the need for quick and easy buck?

Professor ones asked the students:

„If you and I both owned hamburger stand and we were in contest to see who would sell the most hamburgers what advantages would you most like to have on your side?“
The answers vary. Some students say they would like the advantage of superior meat from which to make their hamburgers. Other say they want sesame seed bans. Other mentioned location. Someone usually want to be able to offer lowest price. And so one.

After those students finished telling what advantages they would like to have professor said:
"Ok I will give you every single advantage you asked for. I my self only want one advantage and, if you will give it to me, I will whip the pants off of all of you when it comes to selling burgers.“

„What advantage you want?“ They asked
„The only advantage I want,“ professor replayed, „is starving crowd!“

All we need to find is that “starving crowd” and present all solutions that we have for their problems. That should any Marketing do.

This idea also has one serious drawback. It needs a change of established rules. Like we didn’t learn anything from prior changes from BTSX to BTS rules. Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Anyway there are two questions one is oriented to efficiency and one to effectiveness.  The story above speaks of effectiveness or what to do. The efficiency story should speak how to do it. For that we need professional marketing team, period.
 
How much money Bitshares spend a month for maintaining network?
How much money Bitshares spend a month for its development?
How much money Bitshares spend a month for Marketing?
To provide a clue, marketing expenses should be at least 2% of above mentioned expenses put in hands of hired professional marketing team.

Who is going to decide it?

[Pheonike]

How about keeping it simple. You get a fee for the initial referral plus an amount equal to x% the yield generated by that user for the first year.

[Xeldal]

Is the $20 fee to be part of the scheme really needed? If a user signs up a new account referring to his own old account to get half his fees back, then so what? He his still paying the network something.

If there's no cost to abuse the system, it will be the default behavior.  In that case you may as well set the fee to half what it is because no one would be paying the full fee.

The fee prevents this in most cases.  I suppose if someone intended to consistently make a very large number of transactions it may still benefit them to go ahead and pay the $20 upgrade and collect half of his own fees.   After ~4k transactions (at $.01 fee each) he would start to benefit from paying the upgrade fee.

[merlin0113]

even they lost so much.

I havent lost anything.

sorry, I mean money.

来自我的 M040 上的 Tapatalk

[Ben Mason]

thanks for the stimulating chat guys....catch up soon.

I remain concerned with the perception generated by marketing with more than referrals.  Not sure it's a necessary risk at this stage.  I'm very concerned for all those who are relying upon delegate income / cashing in some BTS to pay the man.  I hope some of the latest developments bring floods of genuinely interested new users soon!

[merivercap]

As long as we stay away from MLM "downlines" and just do one-off rewards, ref= links and qr codes, that should be sufficient.

I agree with this.  Referral systems and giving a reward for getting a referral (a percentage of fees of your referee, and maybe a bonus), is great.  We have all read the story of how Paypal went into massive growth with its referral program.

Making it multi-level and rewarding for referrals of your referrals screams 'scam' and 'stay away' to EVERYONE. 

Please do not all hastily rush to turn Bitshares into an MLM scheme, lose the following of most of our remaining die hards, and cause yet another 75% price drop.  Just because some initial posts on the forum go "yay, this is great!   Bitshares will go up and I will make money!".  We made this mistake already in november, and it lost us most of the support of the chinese community.

You really need to realize that if Bitshares goes MLM, there are going to be 1 million people screaming in every thread in bitcointalk that it is a scam, and every single person is going to see the MLM scheme, and pattern match it to other scams, and think "yep, Bitshares is now confirmed to be a scam".

In fact, I am surprised that NewMine and DecentralizedEconomics havent ALREADY made posts saying this, even though it is just people talking about it.


Please consider just doing a referral plan and rewarding people for referring their plans, and not going full pyramid scheme and turning Bitshares from a wonderful idea into the spawn of evil.

   I'm with Ander on this.  Although I am not opposed to MLM programs in theory and they can be effective, I was never sold on MLM benefits over simple referral systems.  The complex structures/tiers and negative associations that come with MLM is something I'd avoid.  Simple referral systems are great.  I'm not sold on multi-tiers.  If I'm a downline person.  Why should an upline be compensated so much for what I do.  It's like just being first is of ultimate importance and then you wait for everyone else to actually do work.  That's how I always felt and that's how MLM is often sold to people.  Shouldn't this be something the NXTers should be doing?  Or maybe give the idea to Paycoiners so they can last a bit longer before going to zero. 

I'm 100% behind simple referral systems and designing an appropriate % is crucial to balancing the incentives of referrers with perceptions of referrals.

[speedy]

even they lost so much.

I havent lost anything.

[merlin0113]

Also it's really encouraging to see a post manage to get so many ppl discussing and contributing, even in the darkest time. I'm impressed by the PASSION ppl have for bitshares even they lost so much money. Let's do better!

来自我的 M040 上的 Tapatalk

[bobmaloney]

Bitcoin grew without MLM help.  Don't forget the world is about to go through a cataclysmic economic implosion.....BitShares simply needs to be there with its products when it does
Hopefully having maintained it's core principals and unblemished trust.

Bingo.

Mining was basically redistributed MLM, now not so much as the barriers to entry are too high

How?

This seems like quite a stretch.

*Edit:
I would suggest that it had more in common with simple referral marketing, as you get your payoff at once and only gain in value by seeing new adopters and demand for the product.

[speedy]

Is the $20 fee to be part of the scheme really needed? If a user signs up a new account referring to his own old account to get half his fees back, then so what? He his still paying the network something.