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General Discussion / Re: Reasons for Lowering Fees
« on: November 16, 2015, 03:36:53 am »Please let me wrap up my argument.
1. I don't want to destroy the referral system. Instead I want to facilitate it by attracting (or not driving out) users and by spurring more transactions (especially market orders)
2. Desirable transfer fee is about $0.03 (at most), the same as Bitcoin level. Because Bitcoin is our main competitor.
3. Desirable order creation fee is about 1 BTS. Because it can effectively prevent spam at the same time it is as low as possible.
4. There can be possibility to keep transfer fee at the current rate, but to lower order creation fee only. This may need more discussions.
1. The referral system would effectively be gone for those that want to create payment businesses.
2. Traders don't really care about infrequent fixed transfer fees especially if it's only 20 cents. They might be a bit annoyed if it's percentage based and it's close to 1% and they are moving thousands of dollars... Bitcoin is not our main competitor. Bitcoin is hardly used for payments or even p2p transfers. Most people just buy/hold/invest/trade Bitcoin. Online banking, Venmo, Square Cash, Paypal, Apple Pay (will most likely be in p2p payments in 2016) are the competitors and they are all free for p2p payments. We shouldn't try to compete with free. However with our referral system and our focus on merchants, we can actually grow rapidly despite the competition and actually be sustainable.
3 & 4. I believe order creation fees are refunded if cancelled. I'm open to discussing order creation fees, but I'd like to defer to people who are creating their own exchanges like CCEDK and other companies. I'd let new exchange startups decide what are good fees. Exchange businesses can subsidize fees with promotions if they want . We should make the blockchain protocol and parameters fairly stable and sustainable and let businesses who build on top of it figure out various fee structures. It's extremely difficult for entrepreneurs and startups to work if the parameters and protocol change so often.
We're focused on building a payments business and the transfer fees and the referral program are core to our strategy. I made the decision to start working on Bitshares 2.0 because of the fantastic design of the referral system and the protocol features. That was nearly eight months ago. It takes a long time to formulate strategies, build teams, raise money etc. and to have to change our strategy and business model would be extremely difficult. I speak mainly from the payments side of the protocol, because that's our focus.
That's exactly how I feel. If someone starts working on a business model, we shouldn't pull the rug under their feet every 6 months. That's just delaying development and prevent businesses from jumping on board. We need developers and entrepreneurs who will attract customers. Bitshares should provide a solid and stable environment for them.
Regime uncertainty is a real issue and we should be VERY careful before affecting the fee structure., especially when we do not have all committee members slots full.
