Moreover, I think you can return 16k BTS to the user immediately after s/he upgrades, as you'll be sure to be compensated in 90 days by the vesting process.
This way you loan 16k to the customer but this loan is absolutely NOT safe.
It all makes sense if you have other ways to make profit on this customer.
Corrected.
The vesting period of 90days means a fluctuation of bts price. From a business perspective, you need to keep accounting of the price fluctuation at the point of sales and the potential of losses if bts price dropped by end of the vesting period. Some may not be interested to offer a non-profit faucet because of that.
IMO it IS perfectly safe, assuming you are BTS long anyway.
You're right, this will not suit everyone but this assumption holds for most BitShares-related businesses, including bitcrab's transwiser.
You give away 16k BTS today and you're sure to get the full amount back in 90 days.
You need to freeze some of your BTS capital this way, but in return you get a happy customer having access to low transfer fees.
I'm still curious why @bitcrab is not willing to consider this as an alternative option to "1 BTS for transfer".
Probably it need to freeze too many BTS's. Probably you don't know how many potential (ab)users are there in China. 16K BTS per user means 1.6M per 100 users, 16M per 1000 users, imo it's too easy to be exploited.
Maybe the vesting period should be significantly shortened when LTM is bought, as @twitter suggested.
(I'm probably missing something, as I don't know why we need vesting for LTM in the first place - anyone can explain? What kind of abuse would be possible without it?)
And secondly, you need 1.6 M per 100 users in a given time window. But as time goes by, the already vested funds can be reused for new users.
I brought up the vesting issue a few months back and no one -
not a single person - could explain why vesting is necessary when it comes to LTM referral payouts. So I will continue to maintain that there is ZERO reason for such vesting and it should be removed immediately.
Also, why is there any reason for the network to collect a portion of the LTM fee? Think about it. If a user pays for LTM, the referrer gets no piece of the transaction fees going forward. So the referrer NEEDS to collect the LTM fee. But the network gets paid for transactions regardless. So the network doesn't have the same need to get a cut of the LTM, perhaps just a minimal fee to prevent spam.
If we a) cut the network out of the LTM fee and b) remove vesting, it would allow business who don't want their users to pay anything for lower fees to return 100% of the LTM fee back to their users immediately. Whereas business that rely on referrals can let their users pay the LTM fee, which would then go to their referrers.
If we then combine these modifications with a percentage-based transaction fee having the lowest possible minimum (i.e. $.005 spam prevention), we should be able to satisfy all parties. We would still need to debate the % fee (.1%?) and the upper limit ($.10-.20?), but that should be pretty easy relative to the debate that has been raging these last couple days. Thoughts?