Daniel, I understand that we need to get revenues from customers to make BTS sustainable, however how to charge really matters.

China and US are different, you can see that eBay and alibaba have different charging policies, users in China used to enjoy free/low fee fundamental services, even 8BTS fee is hard to accept for them, however, I believe many of them would like to pay 10000BTS to buy a lifetime membership. right, even the transfer fee is 5BTS they also want buy a lifetime membership.

having checked the discussions, I feel the regional based pricing may solve the problem, it is possible a solution by most of the community members and get most consensus.

as I replied in another thread, the regional based pricing can be like this:

set 5BTS as a minimum transfer fee, transfer of BTS, CNY and some other assets need only to pay this minimum fee.
transfer of USD and some other assets need to pay $0.2. 
placing/cancel orders: 5BTS

I think this can be accepted by most users and make the referral program senseful at the same time.

I would venture than 90% or more of the transfers are TO/FROM exchanges for amounts greater than $20 and thus less than 1% is going to fees from transfers.

The fees are only high for non-lifetime members.   The fees are CHEAPER than BTC for lifetime members.   

So if someone has demand for over 625 transfers they can buy in "bulk" by getting a lifetime membership, which is what we want users to do.

This means the real argument is whether or not lowering the price for users who only do a few transfers will increase the number of users by enough to compensate for the losses from those who are OK with the fees.

fees are not cheaper than BTC for lifetime members.
0.0001BTC = $0.028 < $0.2*20%.
don't tell me BTC has inflation, inflation are for each holder, whether you do transaction or not.
and lifetime members need wait for the cashback.
and lifetime members need to pay the fees to upgrade.

high fees will make unexpected trouble, for me, 41 new accounts are created for CDP after import, to close these accounts I need to pay many BTSs. not sure whether other unexpected trouble will come.

as Elmato said, $0.2 USD transfer fees make some project unviable. for my project - the gateway transwiser.com, it is still viable, but I feel I need to do some change, I need to get at least 2 lifetime members and change some rules, even so I think some customers will leave because the high fee.

according to the design of the referral program, most of the members should be common members and they contribute to the referrer, common users should have an acceptable fee so new user can use BTS for a long time before deciding to upgrade to lifetime members. they should not be forced to decide to upgrade or to leave in short time.

BTS1.0 is hard to use, so it do not attract mainstream enough, now BTS2.0 is awesome and have more chance to get adopted, it will be regret if the high fee scare potential customers away.

 I feel lower fees will make the referral program work more well, but I have no scientific proof, let's observe and reason and adjust accordingly.


 

present my opinion at first:

1. the fee should be high enough to protect users from spamming blockchain.
2. the fee should be low enough to encourage users to transfer/trade without too much worry.
3. the referral program is ok, however the fee rate should be determined based on more research and consideration.
4. $0.005~$0.04 for each transfer should fit.

the referral program is built to balance CAC and LTV for a well formed business model, this is really interesting idea however more details need to be checked exactly while implementing it.

the LTV comes from the fees the new users pay, it depend on the transactions the users complete and the fee for each transaction. below diagram shows clearly that not high fee rate, but medium fee rate bring the highest LTV.


so is $0.2 for each transfer high or low? to get a conclusion need some research, however now what we can see is the very low transaction volume, users are discouraged to transfer,clearly.



we need to let the users enjoy to transfer/trade, if users hate to transfer/trade there's no way to build a well formed ecosystem, and nowhere to generate profit.

I found below sentences in Bitshares blog, seems it explains the logic behind the high fee policy:

"While low fees are important, undervaluing the service provided is counter productive. For this reason, BitShares charges a price that is much higher than competing cryptocurrencies but much lower than traditional exchanges and payment networks like Dwolla or PayPal."

if low fee means undervaluing the service provided, then I do not agree the logic presented above, apparently BTS is awesome and referral program is ok, but as shown above, high fee not necessarily bring high revenues, PayPal charge high however Alipay are free but they both provide high value service, users from China, North America hate high fee and I think US users do not hate low fee,in Internet service area it's trend to charge low in fundamental service but charge high in advanced service, and create new ways convert traffic to revenue.

recently, many show their happiness for the reduction in BTS supply, however I fall in different feelings, these days in BTS relevant QQ groups the most frequently sent expression is "hug together and cry", many users show their disappointment and confusion, very rare transfer occured after the launch of 2.0,  I think not only users in China, but also users around the world, including US users feel alike, otherwise the very low transaction volume can not be explained.

all these factors should be considered, and research need to be done to find the right fee rate to make a balance. in my opinion $0.2 is too high, $0.005~$0.03 is more reasonable, medium and acceptable, and seems to generate the highest revenues, hope more data can be collected to suggest.

I basically do not oppose pay fee to Tx, not only protect network ,  but more important system should been a healthy that can gain enough money to supply high level service .
but we would consider how high fee can get more .
There is a relationship between fee and number of Tx

Vertical axis is number of Tx , and the horizontal axis is fee , so the area is the how many total fee (include referral program income ) system gain.
the left drawing show , charge high fee ,but a small number of Tx, so the income of system is small
the middle drawing show charge low fee , there a big number of Tx , but the income is also small
the right drawing show charge fit fee ,and the number of TX is a little lower than system capacity ( bts design is 100,000TPS ) , system get Max income

what position we are , I think is left drawing .

agree, whether the reduction in BTS supply really worth being happy should be considered more deeply with the reduction of usages.

empty again,  many users have trouble on this, please fix this with high priority, we cannot expect people to check/fill the fee pool before doing transfer.

Quote from: giantcrab on October 10, 2015, 01:29:33 pm

Quote from: fav on October 10, 2015, 11:55:08 am

Quote from: Erlich Bachman on October 10, 2015, 11:38:38 am

give us a voting range of 0.1 to 20 BTS and we will initially start out at 20 but and when a new competitor finally enters our Public Smart Property space, the. we can lower the price to undercut the competition. Its business 101.  Launch your new tech product with high profit margins the. lower it over time to discourage competitio.  This will allow us to keep the monopoly longer and pay for more R&D with serious profits.

the fees are good for several things we need:

- flood prevention
- affiliate marketers
- fee pool (which funds development)

so everyone demanding low fees for the sake of micro transactions should look for one of the 1000 other coins that offer nothing more than that. we have a business to run and sustain here.

only the first reason -flood prevention- is reasonable.
it is not a good idea to get development funds from transaction fees.
look at ripple. or NXT, they also keep on developing, but with low fees.
maybe 1BTS  fee is acceptable, but 20BTS fee will create big problem.   

NXT has 0 growth, Ripple is a centralized shitcoin, I don't see any connection to Bitshares there.

In order to get people in it was decided to get an affiliate system, and that's the best move in my opinion.

if you want small tx fees, upgrade to lifetime member, then you can have 4bts/tx.

please elaborate on the "big problem" you see

now 20BTS = 0.75CNY, if the price of BTS go up, it will be easy for it worth 1CNY, 2CNY.
alipay is free for transfer, many online transfers between banks in China are free, to pay 1CNY to do a transfer in a cryptocurrency system? this is a very bad feeling, however of cource, if you need to discourage new users to join or encourage the current users to leave, this is a good method.

there's many ways to get funded, to issue an asset, to provide customized service or even contact VC, relying on transaction fees bring the worst user experience.
and, to get development fund from fee pool  bring this worry: development team enjoy high fee rate, their interest is not consistent with that of the user/stakeholders, this may bring some kind of centralization and make the community split.

any update?