What is the use case of Bitshares for average user at moment? Buy and Hold. Buy and Hold doesn't generate a lot of fees which doesn't generate alot of income for referrers.There is anything for them to use it for yet. The only thing for the average user to do is refer other users. What is the average user using bitshares for at the moment?. The infrastructure is still being built. Currently there is use case for traders. They have an immediate use for Bitshares. They can trade between other assets/uia and use bitusd to hedge. Traders are the immediate customer for Bitshares. They will generate the most fees for referrers. Until an average user can buy groceries or pay bills with bitusd they wont be generating fees because they wont be transferring BitAssets anyway.
, referral programme has limited value atm
The referral program won't work without a product to sell.
The core product is BitAssets, but without a credible plan for liquidity/incentives for market makers it will be very slow going to attract regular customers.
If you're struggling to artificially create BitAsset liquidity then you have to look at introducing other key sellable products that will bring users in and who will slowly create that liquidity over time. But paying more people to promote BTS but with nothing users want to buy when they get here is not the answer imo.
We can see from the recent LTC and BTC pyramid ponzi schemes that when people are incentivised to promote crypto related products they can quickly go viral.
So combine a legitimate referral programme with an innovative and useful crypto product & you do have the recipe for great results.
I think the referral program is the most attractive and valuable feature of Bitshares at the moment. The main reason people use any exchange or get involved with Bitcoin is to make money. One way or another it's about making money.
If you're offering products and or services for Bitcoin it's because you would like to acquire Bitcoin. If you're mining Bitcoin it's because you would like to acquire Bitcoin. You would not care to acquire Bitcoin if Bitcoin were not worth significant USD/fiat.
People trade to make money, people market and evangelize to make money. Bitshares is the first and so far only network which has no barrier to entry in profit making. With Bitcoin you can't get paid to evangalize and if you can't mine it with your CPU anymore you cannot say the barrier to entry is low anymore. You don't have a lot of simple easy ways to earn Bitcoins which is why it's slow to catch on.
On the other hand if Bitshares is something anyone can earn with time and effort it will spread like a wild fire. Traders who make a profit on an exchange tend to keep trading on that exchange. So if there are many opportunities for profit on an exchange they might favor that exchange by giving their liquidity to it. Nice GUI and features do help, but ultimately it's just either a profit making activity or not. If traders are on the losing end of the trade then the ecosystem has to profit them with ways to earn enough BTS to keep trading.
The bond market is probably the best way to create a strong ecosystem for traders. Anyone can loan and earn interest. The interest could then be used as part of their personal trading fund. So the main issue Bitshares seems to be having is lack of a closed loop economy.
Programmers and the inner circle of witnesses make plenty of money in the current economy, but these are too few people to properly bring Bitshares to the masses. A prediction market would allow the masses to make money, and when they make money they can evolve into traders. Minebitshares was supposed to be a way to bring the masses in because the masses typically earn money from mining and then trade what they earn. Prediction markets would be even better than mining if it were to catch on, and winners could go and trade.
What is the use case of Bitshares for average user at moment? Buy and Hold. Buy and Hold doesn't generate a lot of fees which doesn't generate alot of income for referrers.There is anything for them to use it for yet. The only thing for the average user to do is refer other users. What is the average user using bitshares for at the moment?. The infrastructure is still being built. Currently there is use case for traders. They have an immediate use for Bitshares. They can trade between other assets/uia and use bitusd to hedge. Traders are the immediate customer for Bitshares. They will generate the most fees for referrers. Until an average user can buy groceries or pay bills with bitusd they wont be generating fees because they wont be transferring BitAssets anyway.
This is exactly it. The average user needs an entry point into the Bitshares economy. EarnBitShares, MineBitShares, Prediction Market, Bond Market, Crowd Funding, and whatever else. The current community is going to have to take advantage of UIAs and private assets to create the age of opportunity for new entrants. A new person seeing Bitshares for the first time should be overwhelmed with all the ways people are making money off the blockchain and it should look like easy money.
Bitcoin looked like easy money at first. Anyone could just download the client, mine, and start generating money. When it was GPU mining, even after Bitcoin mining had died down, there was a long period from 2013-2014 where anyone with a GPU or CPU could mine and there were coins along the way like Primecoin, Protoshares, and many many others, where people were able to earn hundreds or thousands of dollars a month, and then they could trade with it.
So the money from trading which grew Poloneix and similar centralized exchanges came from the mining culture which backed it. Because Bitshares has no mining culture, it will require that a new culture form in order to allow people to work within the ecosystem. We cannot tell people to work a day job and then buy Bitshares to trade on the exchange because that isn't how professional traders do things and isn't the culture. They will probably not buy lifetime accounts unless they somehow earned the money to buy those accounts from the Bitshares ecosystem.
It becomes easy to sell lifetime accounts to people who already make money from Bitshares prediction markets for example.