Lets assume you are a trader on BitShares and plan on updating your order often, so become a lifetime member. The cost to place an order is 2 BTS or $0.01.
20k BTS for lifetime member is also a cost. Why don't we think about a normal user who is not a lifetime member?
I have paid more than $100 in fees to BitStamp and am a "normal" user. Paying a lifetime membership fee makes sense and is still cheaper than paying regular exchange fees. If I were an active trader on BitStamp my regular fees would be an order of magnitude higher than a lifetime member. So I think it is safe to assume that anyone who will trade so much that the fees matter it is worth it to become lifetime members. Everyone else it is still cheaper at the full rate.
It is all psychological.
Probably 95% of users don't pay $100 a month for trading fee. They only pay 0.1~0.2% of their order when it filled.
We have a high level of capacity (100 TPW atm). We don't have to be parsimonious. Why don't we sell our network resources at a lower price (with lower trading fees)? IMHO, trading fee at the initial stage of ecosystem expansion, in which attracting new users is the most priority, should be as low as to prevent spammy transactions. In BTS 1.0 with 0.1 fee, there were no spamming attacks. So I would suggest 2.5 BTS trading fee for non-lifetime members (and 0.5 for lifetime members as like a default setting of BTS 1.0).
agree 0.5 BTS trading fee for lifetime member.
the method to get money from customers' pocket really matters.
a good method can make the customers pay much with happiness.
a bad method always make the customers feel unhappy, and always decide not to buy.
now Bitshares looks like a restaurant that few people sit inside and enjoy food, but the manager keep on shouting "go out, poor guys, don't sit here without buying food!"
yunbi is free, btc38 charges 0.1%, polo charges 0.2%, bitstamp may charge more.
but why more users trade BTS in polo and btc38, not yunbi? yes, liquidity.
now the liquidity in DEX is low, either high or low fees, few trading chance here.
so the point is "how to make the liquidity grow?"
the answer is to attract market maker.
market maker update orders frequently, robot trading is always used. so if placing orders cannot be free, it should be low enough, if market maker always need to calculate the fees before updating orders, they would not like to trade.
or maybe there can be a "market maker" membership for high trade, low transfer demand users, an account can pay say 1000 BTS monthly, and then enjoy the counter spamming fee for each order updating.