Do you know Argentina is one of if not the most lucrative BitAsset markets because of capital controls and USD demand?
These countries are the BitAsset target markets.
If they say the fees are too high we need to listen.
The key target markets that could be motivated to try it at this stage are places like Argentina, Greece, China etc.
Yes, these countries are the BitAsset target markets
after we make the BitAssets actually work, i.e. there is a liquid market with low spreads allowing users to exchange BitAssets back and forth with fiat. Until that happens we don't have a working product to sell and discussing lowering its price is premature for me.
And who will make BitAssets liquid? Is it the low volume users from South Amercia, Asia or Africa or is it the high volume traders with lots of cash to play with? I bet it's the traders, so it's definitely them we need to satisfy at this initial stage. And from my understanding it's the unfinished GUI and unstable market rules that make them unhappy, not the fees.
If the traders start complaining that the fees are too high - then we should reconsider. But arguing that people in lower-income countries are not using BTS because the fees are too high does not make sense to me. I think they are not using BTS because
the product doesn't work yet in the first place.
Also, apart from traders there is a second group of users we should care about: the merchants. The consumers are not really sensitive to transaction fees (assuming an average consumer makes a couple of online transactions a month). It's the merchant who is sensitive to the price as currently s/he needs to sacrifice about 2% of their turnover just to be able to receive payments. So from the merchant's point of view BTS should be significantly cheaper and this is our key customer. Also, a generous referral program (and it can only be generous if we keep the fees as they are) is an attractive option that we can offer to the merchants but our competition (PayPal & debit cards) cannot. It's our unique selling point.
To summarize: at this initial stage we should only care about traders and merchants. Ordinary users complaining about transaction fees are irrelevant.
No we don't, we have a relatively new, risky, complicated product that is not particularly liquid with very limited third party support.
(So we're not competing with PayPal or online use of debit cards at this stage as some are suggesting.)
Yes, our product is currently far less user-friendly and more risky that PayPal and debit cards.
But for me a better strategy is to upgrade the product (by concentrating all efforts to make BitAssets liquid) than to admit our product is far worse and lower its price.
I understand that we can't target the micro-transaction market, or please everyone and though I don't know how complicated it is, I do believe we need a percentage based system with a minimum fee of $0.01 or $0.02.
I agree that a percentage-based system would make sense but as it requires a hard fork I'd agree with BM that at this stage there are other things with higher priorities than that.