This is all dandy, but misleading.  The claim that this proposal does not raise user fees is absolutely FALSE!

A LTM account pays 20% to network, and gets 80% back in vesting.  And anyone who has self-registered sub-accounts, is the same -- 20% to network and 80% back to the registering account.  Don't mess with this -- any changes represent a major breach of trust to anybody who paid the $80-$150 to become a Life Time Member.

I see what you mean now, you're right that to LTM users this proposal represents an increase in user fees, as up to this point the LTM benefits include 80% cashback on fees spent.

I'd argue that the only guarantee provided by the LTM membership is that the membership lasts the lifetime of your account, not that the benefits associated with an LTM account will last a lifetime. The wording on LTM membership acquisition page does not imply that the benefits are permanent, and thus are subject to change at the discretion of network consensus.

Do it with market fees.  Then there is no worry about how to convert to a chosen bitAsset, and is market driven -- more volume creates more revenue.

[ ... ]

EDIT: And another reason market fees are better than transaction fees is that is does not change the rules 'retroactively'.  Anybody who doesn't like new market fees can choose not to trade in that market.  Whereas changes which lessen LTM benefits are forced on those who thought they got something different.

So instead of changing the distribution of existing transaction fees, you're proposing new fees to be imposed on the network to pay for the dividends functionality? Wouldn't this potentially have a negative effect on the DEX considering that it would become more expensive to use, as opposed to reallocating transaction fees which would have no change in charged fees to the end user?

Also consider openledger who graciously faucets new user accounts.  They do so with the understanding that they get a cut of the user's transaction fees via registration (and referral, if not otherwise filled) percentages.  I think it's a bad idea to change this now.[/i]

I acknowledge that registrars/referrers will be negatively affected initially by the reduction in their earnings, however if the introduction of dividends/profit-sharing drives a larger user base to the BTS DEX this could be somewhat negated.

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In fact I feel sick for the ""
this title make Bitshares looks like a scam
I wish never see this title in the official site.

I disagree that this is a scam, it's simply a proposal to change the distribution of currently collected fees to pay asset holders on the BTS DEX.

I agree that we should not explicitly state a static percent as a 'guaranteed interest income', as the income is dependent on the amount of transaction fees generated by the BTS DEX. This could be lower or higher than 5% depending on future use.

bank have many real business to pay the divident.
where is the business based bitshares?
I believe we'll get divident too after we have some real business.
pay divident is the result, not the reason.

The Bitshares business is the utilization of the BTS DEX - the transaction fees generated within the DEX can be utilised to pay dividends to asset holders.
External companies can certainly pay dividends using the BTS DEX (like obits/icoo, etc) but we can also do this for the BTS DEX (without issuing new tokens or buying tokens for the distribution).

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I tend to agree with alt on this. I would much rather have us start actually burning the fees instead of recycling them into the reserve pool so that bitshares would eventually go deflationary.

You can already do this by utilising the worker proposal mechanism to burn BTS within the reserve pool.
Sending fees to the reserve pool is temporarily deflationary as it will take a long time to burn through these assets at the current spending pace.

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Benefits over transaction fee distribution:
1. Market Fees produce bitAsset of choice -- no need to convert BTS to bitAsset for dividend payment.
2. Does not violate LTM agreement
3. Does not mess with referral expectations

"Your share in the Decentralized Exchange"

Producing revenue from market activity is a natural income source for an exchange.  Sharing it with Bitshares users makes sense to me.

We already produce revenue from market activity via transaction fees without the need for additional market fees.

I've numbered your points for easier referencing:
1. You can pay transaction fees in assets other than BTS, so we can already immediately distribute bitUSD to bitUSD holders instead of converting it from bitUSD -> BTS prior to redistribution. Unless this is an automated process right now? The committee in charge of the fees assigned to the reserve pool could provide additional information here.
2. The agreement was that the membership you purchased was to exist for a lifetime, not that the benefits were permanent for the lifetime of your account. These benefits should be subject to change, given sufficient network consensus.
3. The referral system being allocated 80% of transaction fees was unfair to begin with, there was an expected replacement income stream for asset holders in the form of a bond market which never materialized. It's time for asset holders to have a slice of the pie allocated to them. Referrals don't keep users around, dividends do.

so who's formulating the idea and approaching blockpay.ch (via email)?

I'll raise this topic during the next Bitshares hangout on the 14th. I'd appreciate anyone reading this to reach out to others they believe would be interested in this topic (for discussion or development).

I know there are plenty voicing opinions in this thread, but I'd like to take a moment to share mine.

First and foremost, I do not agree with any actions that add strain to the reserve pool (without a very strong argument for long term benefit).  Witness pay has just increased and more active workers are draining the pool faster than increased activity can keep up.  Long term goal should be a sustainable pool which balances pay with fees.

I believe the idea re: fees allocated to the reserve pool has shifted towards an increase of fees being allocated to the reserve pool, which would be a deflationary move which would slow the rate at which we are burning through the reserve pool.

Second.  There should be no change to LTM fee percentages (small changes to non-LTM is fine with me).  Many have chosen LTM knowing the cost-benefit of 80% fees returned.  Don't mess with this.

Agreed, no changes to the existing fee schedule are in scope of this proposal. The topic is discussing the allocation of the fees accumulated from the existing fee schedule, between the reserve pool, referral system and asset holders.

Third.  We must explore motivations and desired outcomes for any suggested changes.  What problem are we trying to solve?  What impact does this have on the long-term health of the Bitshares ecosystem?

In my opinion, the two things which would help Bitshares the most is:

• increased supply of bitAssets
• usable liquidity

The problem we're trying to solve is the lack of incentives for holding assets on the Bitshares DEX long term; back in BTSX we offered 'x% on anything' where by holding bitUSD yielded a portion of the bitUSD fees (proportional to the total amount of bitUSD in existence). The potential 'interest' rate in such a profit sharing mechanism is/was greater than the interest rates offered by FIAT banks.

This profit sharing mechanism was one of the major marketing points of BTSX that I have missed in the BTS 2.0 DEX and I think that its reintroduction could boost the amount of users utilizing the BTS DEX.

By increasing the incentive to hold FIAT savings as bitassets on the BTS DEX we potentially increase the amount of bitassets in existence & thus less BTS are liquid.

Regarding usable liquidity, if there are more bitAsset holders then we have more individuals who could actively participate in market making (especially with the ease of use of new tools such as btsbots).

The reason being that more active and usable markets will attract new traders to the DEX.  Rewarding those who simply hold assets does not improve the DEX.

If we can get all/most/more Bitshares holders to hold their bitshares on the DEX instead of on centralized exchanges, we minimize the risk of said centralized exchanges having a massive voting weight with which they can disrupt the voting mechanism (proposals/polls/committee/witnesses/etc).

I come back, then, to the idea suggested a little while ago: Reward those who have bitAsset debt (collateralized position) with (new) market fees from same bitAsset markets.  Only those with debt collect dividends (from the market-produced trading fees -- aka "market fee") at a pro-rata basis.  Simply holding a bitAsset does not yield dividends.

Providing dividends upon shorting of bitassets is open to abuse, 'yield-harvesting' was one of the main reasons that this functionality was removed during the upgrade from BTS 0.x to 2.0.
https://bitshares.org/blog/2015/06/08/lessons-learned-from-bitshares-0.x/#socialized-yield-is-broken

Holding a bitAsset means that you've either bought these tokens off of someone that shorted them into existence, or you created them yourself with sufficient backing collateral, so an increased demand for bitAssets for long-term holding does improve liquidity.

This referral sys was BS since its inception. Its overall costs are several orders of magnitude higher then its benefits.
That was Max Wright idea, I remember BM was against at the time. It is mystery to me how they manage to persuade him to change his mind and include it in BTS 2.0, as well as leather disappearance of its sole creator. It reminds me of amateur marketing Bitshares consumes since Brian Page.

Overall this system didn't bring anything to Bitshares except a benefit to entities which take advantage of this hidden taxation tool. Which brings me to the point. I am afraid it will be very hard to get enough support for the change of this useless feature. But we'll see.

The referral system isn't worthless, it's driving new users to the network but I agree that it's currently allocated too large a slice of the overall network fees and not enough users are making use of it.

Quote from: Geneko on April 08, 2017, 10:06:19 pm

This referral sys was BS since its inception. Its overall costs are several orders of magnitude higher then its benefits.
That was Max Wright idea, I remember BM was against at the time. It is mystery to me how they manage to persuade him to change his mind and include it in BTS 2.0, as well as leather disappearance of its sole creator. It reminds me of amateur marketing Bitshares consumes since Brian Page.

Overall this system didn't bring anything to Bitshares except a benefit to entities which take advantage of this hidden taxation tool. Which brings me to the point. I am afraid it will be very hard to get enough support for the change of this useless feature. But we'll see.

I disagree. The fee change to nothing and the lack of features for ltm rendered it useless. Referral systems are multi billion dollars of magnitude better than what anyone else could possibly add to BitShares. Problem is no one here has any clue.

Fees aren't 0 though, the rough estimates of 1 million BTS per month at current rates works out at $6400 per month for the referral system.

I disagree that nothing better than the referral system will be implemented into the Bitshares network, this thread alone is proof that better ideas than the referral system can exist. Billions of dollars of magnitude? Bitshares hasn't seen this magnitude come from the referral system, lol.

No one here has any clue? Why not educate us on that which you claim we don't know instead of putting users down?

Let's not make this all about referral system, this topic is too important.

Here's a thought :

Take 20% off of the fee pool.
15% go to ALL DIVIDENDS
5% go to LTM DIVIDENDS

that would lead to yet another cycle, investors would upgrade, fuel fee pool by upgrading and marketers/registrars  would earn as well.

Win win win?

What happened to finding devs and price estimation before talking about the 'golden girls'? Haha https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,23981.msg304394.html#msg304394

You say 20% off of the fee pool, do you mean the 20% allocated from fees to top up the reserve pool, or a 20% sharedrop from the reserve pool?

I agree with Tbone (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,23981.msg304385.html#msg304385) that by cutting the 20% from the reserve pool income that we somewhat introduce inflation (as these assets would otherwise have been locked temporarily in the reserve pool), where as if we were to cut the fees allocated to the referral system we would not experience inflation.

I like the idea of introducing a separate allocation of the dividends to the LTM users, it could potentially drive up LTM registrations!

We should vote on the 80% fee allocation between referral and dividend features if this idea gains traction.

BTS reserve pool should be spent on essential network operations only, which are witnesses and essential development projects. Referrals, dividends and other farts and whistles  should be funded other ways.

And giving away 80% of BTS revenue to referrals is just stupid.

I agree that referrals and dividends should not come out of the reserve pool, and I don't believe anyone in here is proposing this - we're focused on the fees that are currently allocated to the referral system.

@Customminer -- I'm not sure over what period time those fees were accumulated.  But it can't possibly be since inception of BTS 2.0.  I don't even think that pool includes all fees currently being collected.  I mean, where is BTS on that list?  The overwhelming majority of fees are collected in BTS, not those other assets, right?  So we need some clarification as to what that pool is, exactly. 

But in the meantime, looking at the top 20 "most fees paid" list on cryptofresh, it appears we've generated at least ~17M BTS in fees since BTS 2.0 launched.  That's about 1M BTS per month.  Actually, it's more since this is only the top 20 accounts in terms of fees paid.  So I think it's pretty close to my guess of 1.2M BTS monthly.  Not to mention, the current monthly rate of fee collection should be higher than the monthly average over the last 18 months considering the substantial growth in transactions we've been experiencing.  On the other hand, a lot of the fees listed below may be from creating assets and therefore more "one-time" in nature (or at least more irregular). 

Anyway, this is just a bunch of guess work.  We need to know the actual rate of monthly fee collection.  But if my guess is even close, then this idea of redirecting a portion of referral rewards could fund substantial bitAsset demand without having to increase fees.  Even if I'm off by an order of magnitude, then this could still be worth pursuing considering, as @fav mentioned, it could kick off a virtuous cycle that could end up being substantial.

Excellent, I was thinking that the fee tables on Cryptofresh were a tad off. These figures make the concept far more feasible & worthwhile of implementing. The more successful the BTS DEX gets, the better the interest rates become.. if only FIAT banks worked like that, haha!

I was just thinking about how exchanges would behave if we introduced this functionality.. Would they claim the interest? If they did, would they pass this onto their users? If they didn't collect the interest, or didn't forwards the interest to the rightful asset holders could this seriously reduce the quantity of coins being held on centralized exchanges? It may tilt balance back in favour of decentralization.

By the way, we really should not contemplate reducing the network's current 20% share of the fees.  That would be inflationary, which would decrease demand for BTS.  It would also make it more difficult to fund worker proposals.  If anything, we should increase the network's share, which would be deflationary and would also make it easier to fund worker proposals.  Both factors would help increase demand for BTS and help compound the effect of offering interest by contributing even more to the virtuous circle.

Funding worker proposals in the short term would not be affected, as the BTS stored in the reserve pool is substantial. That said, I agree that reducing the network fees would lead to BTS being made liquid in a more rapid fashion, but I do not agree that it is entirely inflationary as it is just reintroducing coins (which would otherwise have been temporarily locked away) back into the public's coin supply in a more timely manner. A more explicitly inflationary move would be to sharedrop BTS from the reserve.

I think we can make substantial room for 'x% interest on anything' out of the referral system's fees.

Quote from: tbone on April 08, 2017, 12:59:02 pm

By the way, we really should not contemplate reducing the network's current 20% share of the fees.  That would be inflationary, which would decrease demand for BTS.  It would also make it more difficult to fund worker proposals.  If anything, we should increase the network's share, which would be deflationary and would also make it easier to fund worker proposals.  Both factors would help increase demand for BTS and help compound the effect of offering interest by contributing even more to the virtuous circle.

agree, just take 20% of referral income. that way registrars could still maintain 20%, marketers could get 20% and 20% interest

I believe that we should offer more than 20%, this is something we could potentially vote on within the client. How would we go about voting on multiple possible parameter outcomes within the client? Best to bring this topic up in the next Bitshares hangout on Friday then move forwards to polls with a few hand selected combinations?

How about:

Network; x% Interest; Referral System
20, 40, 40
30, 40, 30

I'm in favor of a Dividend method.

Seconded. It'd be great if there was an automated & scheduled dividend mechanism for MPA assets.

If we implemented dividends for MPA then also providing the functionality (by default disabled) to UIA would be great, not just redistribution of fees but the issuance of additional UIA as a form of interest (only plausible for UIA, not MPA/EBA as they require real backing value).

Quote from: crypto123 on January 12, 2017, 12:44:55 pm

Cool, can we tip any asset via the forum?

Not yet. And if forums change as proposed more and more on the forums, maybe not all.

I'm looking forwards to the release of Whaleshares and Sharebits

Quote from: lil_jay890 on April 06, 2017, 02:00:31 pm

Buy bitBTC or OPEN.BTC.  I'm guessing the alt coin pump is coming to an end and bitcoin will probably bounce back to having %75-%80 market cap dominance.

Other than Xeroc's worker, there hasn't been anything really of note to get super bullish on BTS (I'm sure someone will post a huge list of all the great things coming for bts).  It's the same story with most of the other alts.  Random pumps.

I wouldn't mind knowing what's going on with BTS?

Tune into the Bitshares hangouts each week: https://soundcloud.com/beyond-bitcoin-hangouts