I agree, raising the fees to help pay for referral at this time is a great idea....

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!

let's see some facts:

https://faucet.bitshares.org/refscoreboard

Referrers in total around 1500. in total. all our combined and track-able marketing/advertising efforts up to this point. Let's say 25% were real users. how many of those 25% stayed? let's assume 5% (probably a lot less)

Total users: ~20

No matter how great this product is, it won't grow without help. Apart from new active/inactive users, marketer will bring entrepreneurs and merchants with them.

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.

A round up of ideas so far.

1. A fee to upgrade to earner status is important because it stops people signing up under themselves and abusing the system.  It is a must.

2. We get called scammers and MLM'ers all the time now by some retarded bitcoiners.  Bitcoiners get called drug dealers by some retarded people all the time too. You can't base your life and your business on what dumb people call you.  We already get called names.  True with a 1 tier referral system we will get more of it.  From a multi-tier system we will get even more of it again.  We all had the intelligence and the integrity to repell accusations of being drug dealers because we were involved in crypto. Hopefully we have the intelligence and integrity to repell these accusations too.

3. For those that have the Pavlovian response to MLM, I say get educated first.  A pyramid/ponzi has 2 defining characteristics.  1. There is no product and 2. It is impossible to earn more than your referrer.  We obviously have a great product, but thee is an easy way to put this fear to bed.  Simply have more non-income earning customers than income earning customers.  You achieve that by making the business opportunity less attractive. eg: Payout a smaller percentage of fees as rewards and/or increase the upgrade fee.  And by structuring the tiers so that the first tier gets a much higher percentage than the other tiers you easily guarantee that producers get paid the most and free loaders get paid the least.  ie: people can out earn their referer.

4. Now that you know what an MLM is and is not, know that some of the largest companies in the world are MLM and billions of dollars are generated from MLM each year. It is just a marketing structure. That is all. One that lends itself perfectly to blockchain technology I would think.

5. Because we need to have an upgrade fee to be an earner (point 1) we will never be a nice neat and clean referrel program like Paypal was. Even a single tier program will get called a scam.... a lot.

6. This is not an act of desperation in anyway.  One way or another bitshares will have a multi billion dollar market cap because the product is that good. It can change lives for better and by a lot.   The question is... What is the most effective way to get the word out.

7. Quote from world famous marketer Jay Abraham.  "If your marketing doesn't make you uncomfortable you are doing it wrong"

Bitmarket, i don't dispute any of what you are saying.  However, every now and then an idea crops up within the BitShares community that has the potential to fracture it, this is another of those ideas.  All the ideas had integrity.  We should wait to see what comes of the most recent efforts to build and network.  Perception is very important at this stage, more important than aggressive marketing.  The BitShares ecosystem is not the same as those other companies that have successfully deployed an MLM strategy.

Quote from: kenCode on March 26, 2015, 07:16:52 pm

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.

this 

Look do we believe in BitShares or not?  Do we have patience or not?  Please can we allow some organic growth to arrive from all the hard work that is going on.......

Thanks for posting.  Really love this project 

'The network will refuse updates that don't improve it'...........so dam cool i could kiss them.

Rocking in marketing side? How?
How many bts holders want to buy a 3D printer? How many 3D printer customer hold bts?

If every merchandise accept bts need a delegate......

And whether they want a delegate or not is up to them, right?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

mitao, don't you see interest across new technologies that are changing the world as an exciting prospect?  There is an enthusiasm, desire to network and attempts to cross market here.  Is that not worth encouraging and fostering?  How do you think partnerships are forged?

Quote from: Ben Mason on March 24, 2015, 01:40:55 pm

The value to society is incalculable.  The marketing value of Vote to BitShares is potentially gigantic.  There is a great deal of synergy between all these transaction/ledger based technologies.

I enjoyed the video, comes across with great energy, though it was a touch hard to follow.....no pun intended.

Follow My Vote is proprietary software and will never make Bitshares profitable if by some far off chance it does take off. It will only make BM, AK and his team rich, not the Bitshares holder.

That would be news to me.....certainly not the value proposition I bought into