There were a lot of good arguments in this discussion. A short note, we also have to keep in mind that Chinese exchanges charge almost 0 fees for trading and transfering crypto because the competition among exchanges is so high. If you want to have high volume and attract traders in China, you need to provide low fees. Since we are in a global competition that also affects our exchange. BitShares is doing better with low fees. Other exchanges that are just focusing on local markets, like Turkey, Greece, Poland, or Mexico etc. can raise higher fees because they have no competition.
Anyways I would like to focus on the following good arguments now.
Things like dividends and referrals should not be coded into blockchain. They should be paid by businesses which run on top of blockchain from their own revenue, whatever they think they can give away. Blockchain fees should be very small, just enough to cover expenses which are essential for running blockchain, namely witnesses and workers.
Agreed. 
For my final 2 BTS on the topic, I don't see why LTM should get a special dividend for doing nothing, especially when it is taken away from referrers. To much emphasis on referrers has the risk of looking like a Ponzi, so I'm not sure I want to see that changed either.
Cheers!
- kani
This .. there is already enough incentive to upgrade to LTM:
- ability to register your own accounts
- ability to enter referral program
- fees reduced by 80%!!!
Paying out dividends only makes sense if the business (BitShares) makes a profit. And we aren't there yet.
Once there is profit generated, we can setup a worker to move funds out of the reserve pool and hand it out to all shareholders of BTS (because they are ALL shareholders) .. but then again, it makes no sense to take them out just to redistribute them .. it would effectively just reduce the price while keeping the market cap ..
Agreed, there is incentive to upgrade to LTM !
The thing that is lacking is the incentive to use the referral program to promote BitShares. This is the missing piece. This tool works on fee, we have lower it a lot and thus broke it.
We have change it because of the Chinese sentiment about it beeing to high. It was suppose to be only while we were gaining traction or before we had an idea to get the referral program working with something else. Since then we have just sadly accept "the referral is dead".
It's not dead, we just need to figure out how to make it exiting again ! It is an amazing way to have people working on promoting Bitshares without paying them, just on the perpective to win money if BitShares takes off and their referred users start using it.
there is a big difference between BTS and a real company share, the price of the latter depends greatly on the dividends while the former does not, we should discuss more on what a business model BTS should or really have but not focus on dividends.
So in summary, it would be better to not hard code a dividend feature in the Blockchain, and rather
- paid out through a worker or
- paid by a 3rd party company referral program
- raise fee later
So following Bitcrab, Data (telegram), and Xeroc suggestions we should focus on the core business model for BitShares and improve it. I wrote the topic down and look forward to discussing it next Friday at the Bitshares mumble. Based on that we can focus on the next steps how to improve the platform over the next weeks.
Once we agree on the right business model, we can adjust the marketing and referral program.