We merely try to engineer cryptoeconomic systems with properly aligned incentives... and then stay out of the way!
This is not completely accurate. When the name of the game requires getting paid for wing-to-wing marketing, incentives aren't always aligned. The best you can say is that in terms of user acquisitions, incentives are align. But that's a meaningless metric. Yo app had ~1 million users but couldn't monetize them. Therefore they had a negative ROI. Platform users aren't paid for the users they keep bringing BACK and consistently using the system. This is the more important metric. The current set up as it stands now, doesn't always allow third-parties the ability to profit fairly from their work. They are maybe at best paid for some of the users that they sign up. But this isn't representative of the core business activities they drive on bitshares. So this statement that incentives are aligned is only half-true. The referral program, while a good attempt, still lacks best way of resolving the purpose of the marketing arm, everyone to fairly profit from their labour. Its not a perfect system right now, and if bitshares becomes large enough (good problem to have), this will be a contested issue over time. The referral program as it stands right now, does not fully help with the monetization of Bitshares.
No doubt, continuing advances will be possible and desirable.
But the current system still incentivizes those who sign up users to maintain a relationship with them and continue to teach them about ways to use the system more - and generate more revenue for the referrer.
This doesn't have to go on forever however. Once you've convinced one of your new users that there is enough value for them to be worth buying a lifetime membership, that user becomes a self-motivated free-agent seeking to maximize the return on that investment
while paying the referrer a big chunk of their lifetime expected value up front.That membership fee she just paid effectively moves a big chunk of her future lifetime fees into the present!
Where BitShares investors and referral agents can benefit the most from it.
So, when the lifetime membership benefit is taken into account, we have truly decentralized marketing - since every lifetime member is now motivated to train themselves to benefit from that membership and, in so doing, train themselves to convince other new users. We no longer need to build in "fair incentives" for others beyond that, because those incentives have already been transmitted to each lifetime member once and for all.
Closest thing to a self-licking ice cream cone we've come up with so far...
Topic: BitShares Decentralized Marketing Strategy in a Nutshell. (Read 3395 times)
