Gotcha, thank you very much for the graphic and explanation! 80% of fees going to the referral program...what exactly is that?
https://bitshares.org/referral-program/It's used to incentivize people to bring in more people.
It is a MLM-scheme with only 1 level where everyone can opt-out buy
upgrading his account to a Life-time Member.
Does every account get a fee credit for annual vesting balance, with additional allocations based on child accounts linked to ours via referral?
Every life time member, yes!
In order to bring in new users you have two options:
* run your own faucet (like open ledger does) and actually register new
accounts (will give you 80% of all the fees of those minus a fraction
that you decide to give to affiliates (the referers)
* you referr people to OpenLedger or any other hosted wallet with the
?r=<accountname> parameter and get a cut of the 80% fees from
those users as agreed upon by Openledger (or whoever runs the faucet)
[uote] Who controls those referral fees, is there an accumulated balance, and when are distributions made?
[/quote]
referral fees are controled by the blockchain. They are distributed like
this:
- 20% go to the network
- 80% go to the referral program
- of this 80%, x% go to the registrar (e.g. openleedger)
- of this 80%, 100%-x% go to the affiliate referer
Take a look at your "Membership" page to figure out what happens to the
fees you pay.
If you have a life time member account and already paid some fees,
you can withdraw them in the "Vesting" tab of your account.