I am in support of all business strategies that can promote the growth of Bitshares and our community.
A main Bitshares product is a stable crypto-currency called bitUSD (together with bitCNY, bitEur etc). Unfortunately, it is not working now because of low liquidity. Some people have attributed the low liquidity to the lack of trading bots which could be because of the lack of API, while others said the traders are being driven away due to high trading and order fees. I believe both are contributing factors. I think lowering trading and order fees is a good start to build up liquidity. And if our traders, who are our existing customers, are suffering from the high fees, we need to work on relieving their pain area. We not only want to keep our existing customers (traders) happy but to grow the pie. Our trading and order fees have to be competitively priced against the well established centralised exchanges. And until such time that our liquidity overtakes them, we need to keep this competitive pricing.
With regards to transfer fees, it is a more complicated matter to consider. Bitshares is a late comer to the industry as compared with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a competitor of ours in term of the merchant/payment market. It is wider known and it has a large user base while Bitshares is almost 'non-existence' comparatively. However, Bitshares has a new business model which is beyond what Bitcoin can offer. It created a well-defined referrer system to attract and reward marketers and referrers. The referrer programme is our competitive advantage.
At this early stage of establishing a foothold, Bitshares needs and is building a group of marketers and referrers to reach out to the untapped markets. We have a few referrers now, with fav and jakub better known but I believe there are many others building up their referrer plans and executing them behind the scene. These referrers have already put in lots of effort and time to build up their referrer businesses. In time to come, they will bring in new users and transactions to the bts2 network. There is a potential that this strategy can bring in much more businesses than our competitors. So for now, I like to see the transfer fee stay - as a way to pay for our marketers' and referrers' time and effort, and to incentivise them to bootstrap a user-base that we need desperately.
Please share your thoughts and comments.