Quote from: bitcrab on February 03, 2016, 04:23:11 pm

Quote from: jakub on February 03, 2016, 03:54:27 pm

Quote from: bitcrab on February 03, 2016, 03:42:58 pm

really? I think if I just leave one sentence in my forum signature, users will pass the info one by one. no ad needed.
people like to save money and help others to save money.

So you're talking about the crypto crowd. This market is tiny and extremely tough.

I'm talking about "normal" customers who don't really care about the technology part. And this market is huge.

so is a solution such as below acceptable to you? it limit referral program to some assets.

Quote from: bitcrab on January 30, 2016, 09:30:16 am

in the updated plan, there will be 3 mode, both mode A and mode C are flat fee, but for A the fee totally go to network, for C referrer will take 80%, the flat fee will be set by committee, but I think A will own a lower fee than B. BTS is the fundamental asset in the system, need to be applied mode A with transfer fee as low as possible.

for public smartcoins, as now there are privatized smartcoins, so its ok for public smartcoins to be applied mode B. users do not like referral program/high fee can play with privatized smartcoins.

I think it's hard to limit the referral program to some assets because you never know which assets the user will eventually choose to use the most.

Let's assume my asset participates in the referral program and your asset does not, and I refer a user to the system but s/he ends up using your asset, not mine.
This way I'll be upset as I've paid to bring the user to the system but it's you who has made profit on this user.

But on the other hand limiting the referral program to some demographics does make sense, IMO.
The crypto crowd generally does not need it, so if CoinHoarder's machine effectively dismantles the referral program on this market, it will not hurt a business targeting "normal" users.

I honestly encourage you to set up a CoinHoarder's machine.
It's worth the effort, if it brings more harmony and less fighting into our community.

@jakub  Setting up the referral program for specific US/Eur assets makes perfect sense. BSIP10 was designed to be optional per issuer/asset anyways.  All of us referral program users are mostly in the US and Europe and the largest advocates for low fees are in China.   It will make everybody happy.  If I want to use TCNY I'll have low fees.  If I want to use Smartcoin USD fees will be higher.  No big deal.   If someone really wants low fees for Smartcoin USD I'm sure people will donate for an LTM account as charity.   

In the end, we don't need smart coins, we don't need BitShares platform, right? If fiat is good enough..

External money means nothing if no one wants to sell her stake to external. 4M $ won't be able to buy 1 billion BTS @0.004$ per BTS. No enough market depth on the selling side.

On the other hand, if you have enough money to maintain BTS price at a certain level, your position will never get margin called. Say, if you own half of all the tokens when market cap is 10M$, and you have another 5M$ fiat, you can maintain a buy wall at current price, so value of the half won't go lower. It's even easier to maintain a buy wall at a lower price for example at price when market cap is 7M$, in this case you just need 3.5M$ fiat.

If Bob own the whole system, how much is his tokens? No trade, no price.

Well I'm not saying fiat is good enough and that's a loaded question because I can go rambling on about banking cartels and printing presses, but that's for another time.  With Smartcoins you can send it anywhere around the world instantly with negligible fees.  You also own the money so there are no limits, freezes, restrictions.  You can also easily trade Smartcoins for any other Smartcoin/Bitcoin asset in the system.  Smartcoins are definitely not the same as traditional fiat.

In any case on to your other point yes if you have enough external money you can support the price so it never gets margin called.  (In the scenario with Bob BTS prices probably would have moved up significantly if he tried to purchase $4 million.  Worst case he could have used all the money to support it. 

Yes if Bob owns the entire system and he does not trade, the price feed would be N/A.  Once he does start trading it will have a price.  People will still value BTS because they use the network and the network generates transaction revenue from all the assets in the system. 

Also prices are not a definitive measure of value.  If only 0.1% of shares of a company's shares trades on any given day, all it indicates is that 0.1% of traders felt it was worth the prices they exchanged for.  Those prices in the price feed determine the 'market value' of a company.  It's the same with the DAC.  99.9% of the people could be HODLing, be on vacation or have lost their keys.   Tis the nature of markets.

Part 1
So every once in a while I revisit the theory of Smartcoins.  At this point the best way for me to describe how Smartcoins are created is explaining the idea of creating monetary assets using debt.  It's actually much like how traditional banks create money, but we can discuss that some other time.

The basic idea is that you can take any asset: home, car, TV and create monetary assets from it.  If a home costs $500,000 you can create a $200,000 loan from it and use it as money.  You can take your car that's worth $5,000 and create a loan on it for $2,000 and use it as money.  You can do the same with a $1,000 TV.  You can create  a $200 loan and use it as money.   Hence you can really monetize any asset that exists in the world if you wanted to.

In the case of Bitshares, the DAC is the asset that you can create monetary assets from.  Feel free to read a white paper we've been working on here: http://bit.ly/1KpkGfe

Part 2
Ok so let's talk about the Bitshares platform right now.  We can click a button and create USD Smartcoins using BTS as collateral.  If we borrow $10,000 that is our debt to the network and we eventually have to pay that back.  The price feed determines about how many BTS that $10,000 is worth every hour or so.  Currently we would have to purchase $10,000 in USD Smartcoins from  the network to extinguish our debt. 

Let's think about this scenario.  Let's say the Bitshares DAC is worth $10,000,000.  Let's say hypothetically one person Bob owned most of the network and wanted to create $4,000,000 in USD Smartcoins and clicks a button to do.   Let's further assume Bob sends  these $4,000,000 USD Smartcoins to wallet B from his wallet A and loses his key to wallet B.  In this scenario Bob can never purchase the USD Smartcoins back to extinguish the debt because there is none available, and if the Bitshares DAC falls to $7 million in value (1.75x USD Smartcoin total debt) it would seem that there would be a black swan/global settlement. 

Part 3
If the above is true, what about allowing people to extinguish the USD Smartcoin debt by paying in BTS.  The price feed always determines the USD Smartcoin/BTS price every hour.  In this scenario Bob can take $4,000,000 he has in his bank, purchase BTS and extinguish the debt and prevent any global settlement from occurring.

This also leads to having USD Smartcoin assets in the ecosystem that are not tied to any debt.  The reason this can occur is because outside capital was put into the ecosystem.  Bob now may have a debt outside the ecosystem of $4,000,000 or he could just be really wealthy.   In any case let's say out of good fortune Bob finds his lost key for wallet B.  He can now pay his outside debt with the USD Smartcoins he recovered.

Part 4
The mechanism above allows us to create monetary assets independent of the supply of USD Smartcoins in the ecosystem.  It may minimize the potential for global black swan settlements.   All that is required is that if someone creates a debt, they pay back the network with the equivalent value based on the price feed.  It can be with internal assets or external assets via BTS.  Thinking about this further, theoretically we don't even need an internal trading market or liquidity.  We can use external pricing as the measure of value.  Of course having good internal markets and using price feeds based on internal markets may prove more reliable in estimating value in the long run.

Anyways.. just some quick late night musings and wanted some feedback to see if this made sense, and if I'm missing something etc... thx. 

No. Make it opposite, 95% to network, 5% to referral.

Quote from: alt on February 03, 2016, 12:35:03 am

Quote from: yvv on February 03, 2016, 12:28:30 am

No. Make it opposite, 95% to network, 5% to referral.

personally I can accept less than 10% to referral.
if somebody have a great contribution to marketing, committee can award them from network's income

I agree. All it takes is one angry BTS shareholder to kill the referral system. Businesses should not rely on it, and we should not make decisions based off of catering to businesses that rely on it.

Logically, the network should just earn the amount it costs to set up a referral system so it should be closer to 0% in the long run.

If transfer fees are reduced to whatever people are deciding at the moment, lets say 6BTS or 2 cents, a  wallet/gateway business can charge 20 cents per transaction (or 1%) and earn a profit.   That business can implement it's own referral system that works exactly the same way it currently does and the network will get 0%.   The reason a business may not want to do that is because of the cost of implementing its own referral program.   Otherwise the program should just be looked at as purely an add-on for businesses to attract users and replace marketing costs. 

I understand this 90/10 idea is meant to be some sort of compensation for the referral businesses for the lost income, in case transfer fees are no longer part of the LTM deal.
(This will effectively happen *IF* the flat transfer fee is lowered to 6 BTS, as the new fee schedule proposes)

I'm not sure this 6-BTS-transfer-fee idea is compatible with BSIP10.

If we lower the flat transfer fee to 6 BTS, and BSIP10 gets implemented, it will be hard to fit into this the minimum and maximum limit for the percentage-based fees.

The min limit is meant to be the minimum the network wants to earn to cover its costs and prevent spam.
And it also needs to be significantly lower than the 6 BTS flat fee - otherwise the %-based fee system will not be popular with issuers.

So if the flat fee becomes 6 BTS, the minimum limit for %-based fees needs to be something like 1 or 2 BTS.
Are we sure it is enough to prevent spam?

If the transfer fee is lowered to 6BTS now, later on when BSIP is implemented we can have 1% fees for Smartcoin US & Eur.  The minimum fee for that can be 2BTS if you want to make it even for the various modes, but even if it was a minimum of 6BTS that shouldn't make the referral program that much less attractive.   Remember you were talking about how the referral program can be seen as optional?  LTMs would be attractive if people want to use Smartcoin US & Eur.  I'll use 1% for the privatized Smartcoin.  It would be nice to have a 2BTS minimum for the %-based models to make it more 'even' and allow LTMs to have the lowest fee, but even if it was a 6BTS minimum I'd still use the 1% fee schedule. 

Quote from: merivercap on February 02, 2016, 09:04:33 pm

I generally support the lower network fees proposal. 

I'm not sure what 'accept the reduced transfer fee' means.  We can still maintain transfer fees for Smartcoin USD & Smartcoin Eur (either 1% or 20 cents) so most referral businesses will be unaffected.  I think all we need to do is reduce transfer fees for specific assets (specifically Smartcoin CNY/TCNY) to support the Chinese community.  Maybe I'm missing something?

The current implementation cant distinguish transfer fees for different assets .. they are the same for every asset

When you say current implementation, aren't we assuming BSIP10 is passed. (It currently has the votes.)  Also I would assume we can distinguish between assets because even Mode B (percentage-based fees) was supposed to be optional for each asset. 

It also seems that we can distinguish from this response here:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,21080.msg275845.html#msg275845

Quote from: merivercap on February 01, 2016, 11:43:39 pm

The danger there is then everyone would get free LTM wherever it is offered and no one would pay anywhere else.

Initially this is what I thought as well. But now I think this is the way it should be!
The referral business should bring some added value to the user (e.g. education materials or a nice mobile app) - if it's not able to do that but just wants earn profit for doing nothing useful, it should go out of business.

And by the way, that's how it works in any other business.
If there is a retail shop that wants to operate without any profit margin, who can stop it?
I'm a big supporter of the referral program, provided it can economically justify its existence. If it cannot do that and it does nothing but keeps the prices high, it should die.

I agree with the general direction you're going and in the end it may not make a difference if some faucets use automatic upgrades by default, but I think keeping the membership structure for specific assets is a better option.  (Mode A/B/C)  The value of the referral is not so much ongoing education or a good UX although that helps a lot, it's just the fact that any user signs up and pays membership for whatever reason.   Also when someone pays for something they are invested and they have a higher probability of using the product even if it doesn't offer that much value.  Of course with Bitshares we shouldn't have to worry about the value part.  Membership is based on exclusivity, otherwise it really isn't a membership.  People may resent the fact that they really weren't paying for discounted fees if they didn't have to for the same product.    I would probably recommend the free LTM instead of selling membership and request a donation because the 'membership' is misleading.  It doesn't seem like that many people want to cut out the entire network fee anyways. 

Having Modes A/B/C just changes certain assets.  The committee can set rates.   It's easier to just add one extra Mode A for CNY assets and appease the Chinese community.  I think that's why they are supporting BSIP10.   Mode B & C can remain the same for US/Eur assets.   The world is happy. 

Quote from: merivercap on February 01, 2016, 11:43:39 pm

Instead of 20cents, LTM's pay 4 cents to the network so it was a way to recoup the difference.

Not true, IMO.
Both non-LTM and LTM users always pay 6 BTS (=20% of 30 BTS) to the network.
So there is no difference to be recouped.

@abit , could you confirm this^?

I just meant it was to offset some of the costs that a LTM would have paid if he/she were a basic member.  Essentially LTMs pay their fees up front and some goes back to the network.

Actually now I think the vesting is ok... It may prevent spam.  It may be good for the faucet/registrar to charge a minimal fee to prevent spam as well.  I can imagine some people just creating massive amounts of spam accounts as an attack.  I do think the network can lower the fee to 10%.  I think the minimum of the faucet can be 10%.  Both the network and faucet need to maintain infrastructure. 

Quote from: merivercap on February 01, 2016, 11:43:39 pm

Just reading the Membership page on OL right now.  50% is split between affiliate and Registrar.  I guess the annual membership is no longer available?  Hmm.. I thought that was originally a good idea. $20 is an easier sell for membership than $100.  Can we implement the annual membership? (We can just make annual members have the same low fees for a year to make it simple?) 

I don't want to comment on other things, but this.. annual membership is intended to be available, but there seems to be a bug so it's actually not available. See https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,21163.0.html

Thanks.  Yeah we should be configuring a faucet soon so it would be good to know. 

Looking at that thread I do see a membership expiration for woodygar, but  the  "referrer_rewards_percentage" seems to be associated with the affiliate % which is set to 0 currently.  Reading: https://bitshares.org/referral-program/   it says up to 50%  so my guess is that OL as the registrar currently has it set at 0% for annual members unfortunately.   My thought now is that annual membership actually refers to the affiliate % ( "referrer_rewards_percentage" ) and everyone has to at least be an annual member to get any referral rewards.   This all seems to make sense now.  There should be an update on OL GUI to say that annual members get the affiliate %, otherwise it's confusing.