But I have to agree with alt on one thing, we need a budget and control spendings. Just because we have some money it doesn't mean we can spend it on stuff just because they sound like good ideas. We need a budget...

We need a plan. We don't have one.
...

I agree with Akado. This project has a good cause and it needs support from the big stakeholders.

Perhaps by addressing their concerns, it would help gain their support.  How about working on the following (if possible and viable) ? :

1) Is there a detailed function/product specification?

2) What is the projected number of transactions using the new percent-based transfer function (an estimation based on some figures would do)?  From there we can derive a projected revenue.

3) A cost breakdown would help. 
- What are the tasks?
- How many manhours needed for each task?

4) Cost comparison.
- How is the cost of source code development and documentation manpower as compared to the market?  Some figures to compare would help.

5) What are the deliverables?  What is the roadmap/timeline for the tasks and deliverables?

6) Warranty for the function/product.  How long is the warranty that ensures a working function/product as stated in the specification?

I still cant believe that EXP got 5000 btc in volume.  WTF.

Pardon me. What is EXP? And why is it up massively?

A gateway simply offers to trade POLONIEX.BTS into real BTS in the DEX .. then you can continue trading BTS (IOUs) in poloniex and polo would still have its voting power .. doesn't really solve the problem of  people keeping their funds on centralized exchanges .. but it solves the issue of needing centralized exchanges for a price feed ..

While it is possible for poloniex (or any exchange) to hold BTS and provide BTS.IOU trading, the risk of holding its own bts is high.   Majority of the bts would be traded exclusively in the DEX and any big price swing against poloniex can be damaging.  I doubt an exchange would take such a risk.

Being independent of an external price feed is significant.  We are getting a well-pegged bitUSD/bitCNY and independent of a price feed.  Tonyk's idea is getting sweeter.

Quote from: cube on February 11, 2016, 07:37:44 am

There is one more possible alternative:

3: Forked bts into a Baby net and test the concept on the Baby net.  Baby net starts with a low valuation and sharedrops 100% on bts.  Once it is proven a success, Baby net can be merged back into the parent bts.

As a low value token, the BabyBTS is unable to support (or create) so much BabyUSD which is needed to pay for witnesses and workers. Without demand, the market become illiquid, then black swain event will occur, then BabyUSD become not fully backed. Then the baby die.

?

We need bootstrap.

All babies cannot feed themselves.  If this idea indeed materialised into a forked Baby net by the bitshares community, I believe there would be a good number of donors and volunteers to be its low-pay witnesses, and to see it grow.

big disadvantage: because bitshares will be no longer a cryptocurency, I will be not surprised if coinmarketcap will remove bitshares from the list. In the other hand.. bitshares will be still tradeable.. but only on the DEX.

This may not be a disadvantage and it could very well turn out to be a big advantage.  With the shift to bitUSD/bitCNY, our key well-known product, CMC would now publish a stable, well-pegged, high volume  bitUSD/bitCNY. 

I am mainly upset by the way this change is being introduced. Instead of starting with a forum thread "Let's revise the target/purpose of the referral program" to present arguments pro and con, the whole thing has been obfuscated and wrapped into a bigger package that required a lot of prior work done by you and other people. As a result, this strategy change is now entangled with other much less controversial stuff. The fact that you have put so much effort to revise every single fee, validates the purpose of this change in the eyes of many people here and allows you to have less solid arguments about the justification itself. I'm sure you are going to defend this by saying that all of this is interconnected and can only be viewed as a single package, but I disagree. I perceive this as an intentional measure, often used in politics.

I always appreciate your bright ideas and ability to articulate your points well.

As a third-party to the matter, if I may speak out on it.

It did not come across to me (and likely other committee members) that we were getting onto a topic of "Let's revise the target/purpose of the referral program" .  We were thinking of what can be done to enable both the trading/exchange and referral businesses to function well and to prosper together in the bts network.  When one side (trading/exchange) is asking for lower transfer fee, the other side AM/LTM and referral program can continue to be attractive and useful (with other kinds of fee revised).  xeroc has offerred to work on the fee schedule and we are thankful for his work.  In short, we were focusing on fees and their implications (and not just the referral program per se).  As a referrer, it is natural that the matter to you centres around the referral program and that your POV is therefore xeroc 'revise target of referral program'.  Consequently, a misunderstanding arised because of the difference in POV.

As for the transfer fee, the main thing to consider is why we expect users to make transfers in the first place. If a user does not have a good reason to do a transfer, she will not do it, no matter what the fee is. For me this is the main issue: most people currently do have any reason to move their funds around. And there is only one way to give people this badly needed reason: businesses building useful apps around BitShares. For this we need to patiently wait, like a good gardener waits for her plants to grow, and while waiting we must not change the rules.

I believe users do want to transact freely, be it to trade for BTC, to send some bts/bitassets to friends and/or family members, or some other reasons.  However, any transaction of value USD2 or below would mean a transfer fee of 5% -  (30bts or approx USD0.10) too costly and prohibitive. 

As a referrer, one may wait patiently for a potential future that some businesses would build on this fee structure and reap the benefits then.  As a user, one would not see the rationale to continue to suffer the prohibitive transfer fee and to wait for a future that may never come.

Quote from: fuzzy on February 11, 2016, 06:27:32 am

As to how i say we test it, that is open for discussion.  I am no expert daytrader and do not have the same skillset that comes along with it, but in my opinion could do the following:

we run it as a test on the testnet might be a good way. 

So we essentially let people.buy into a competition to see who will end up with the most cash from trading the market...use the buy in and maybe double it using a worker reward and then we can even put up a reddit thread inviting people to join in the competition.  get daytraders TRYING bitshares while they are part of the experiment.  Then you will have effectively used a trading competition to bot only rest it but also promote bitshares THE EXPERIMENT (which is an important distinction for those who might want to join forces) at the same time.  Heck it might even recruit people who have answers i and the rest of the forum may never give you...

The usual problem is, it is hard to simulate real money with fake money (think about how totally boring poker is, when played for fake chips).
[I understand your proposal gives real value to the winner(s). Just thinking about the 'no real loss for the rest" issues/implications.]
I will give it more thought tomorrow fuzz.

We were talking about testing the idea in testnet in Telegram but the disadvantage of a testnet as you pointed out : - we cannot mimic the live network because the risk of losing one's monies is not the same as lossing someone else's monies.

Cause for me there are only 2 choice, really.
1. BM: "dShares just got more interesting."
or
2. TK: "BM is not on board as chief dev. So we are forking and keeping 5-7% as a development fund. The rest is 100% dropped on BTS"

There is one more possible alternative:

3: Forked bts into a Baby net and test the concept on the Baby net.  Baby net starts with a low valuation and sharedrops 100% on bts.  Once it is proven a success, Baby net can be merged back into the parent bts. 

I like the idea of making better use of our underutilised super tps express network.  The transformation into a time-share/co-op model requires further thoughts on possible implications.  But I see that tonyk is already expanding on the co-op concept.