Help keep transfer fees to save the referral system and help Bitshares grow!

[jakub]

And after all this  and more essential stuff is missing, we will have a worker proposal, so we can jump and pivot and spend  6 mo. fighting the imaginary main cause of all ills?  Because after 3 days we discovered that the high fees are the main reason for no instant adoption?

I agree. We have not given the current fee configuration enough time to prove its value. It's barely 3 weeks old and yet we are already conceiving a plan to rearrange it.

We have very limited resources and plenty of things on our list of priorities to make the 2.0 launch complete - yet we open another area which will drain our limited energy.
Constant lack of stability and constantly changing rules - seems to be our well-earned fame.

I'm not against quick interventions regarding rules which clearly cause undesired effects (e.g. margin call rules).
But changing rules and configurations which have not had a chance to fully come into existence - that's unreasonable for me.

[tonyk]

On the other thread I did not really get why we have to lower all other fees if we are trying to attract traders? Seems like a contradiction, doesn't it?

I have a similar feeling. I see a contradiction between our trying to be competitive in the trading business and at the same time trying to make it our main source of revenue from the very beginning.
Those two are hard to reconcile and we need to make a choice. The trading business can be and will be our main source of revenue but not at this initial stage when we are in the middle of this difficult process of jump-starting liquidity.

We need to earn profit to maintain the referral program. And if we cannot rely on trading for generating enough revenue (at this initial stage), there is only one option left: we need to charge extra on our non-core business which is money transfers.

So keep the transfers fees high as they are now. Let them carry the weight of keeping us profitable at this stage. And let us take advantage of this situation: if a BTS user has a valid reason to make a transfer he will make the transfer no matter if it costs $0.20 or $0.05. His main concern is not the transfer fee but whether a SmartCoin can be easily converted to fiat without incurring a big spread. So the conversion spread is the crux of the matter here, not the transfer fee. And to keep the conversion cost low we need to have healthy liquidity, which brings us back to realization that the trading business is sacred and cannot be expected to be highly profitable at this initial stage.

If BTS users keep crying about high transfer fees - so be it. Those users are not important at this stage, we can survive without them (while we cannot survive without traders & trading bots).
It's a bit tough but currently we are not in a position to please everyone.

The general idea must be - we lower the fees to practically zero so they come in bunches, some of them start to trade and we earn trading fees from the volume traders. Do not get me wrong, the trading fees can and should be vastly improved as a design.

The problem with this logic is that this assume they have not come yet, because of the "high" fees. Which is totally not the reason why, im[not so]ho.
There are a  ton of other far more important factors - being way too yearly, hard to transfer accounts [why did  you not spend the time to have o.9.x export keys that take 30 sec to import, instead of days to move to 2.0???]; Not only poorly documented API but one missing essential functions for the simplest bot, and that when we needed one so powerful that everybody can as easily as possible make his version of a  wallet or integrate/move his exchange on the BTS blockchain ; I will not talk about the badly reinvented margin call rules, here... although they do no faviours to liquidity to such extend that having those rules mean never having liquidity; Having  an 'official' gui that is missing so much important functions - why for example one cannot yet claim his vested balances? It is a button and calling one api function, isn't it?

And after all this  and more essential stuff is missing, we will have a worker proposal, so we can jump and pivot and spend  6 mo. fighting the imaginary main cause of all ills?  Because after 3 days we discovered that the high fees are the main reason for no instant adoption?

[jakub]

On the other thread I did not really get why we have to lower all other fees if we are trying to attract traders? Seems like a contradiction, doesn't it?

I have a similar feeling. I see a contradiction between our trying to be competitive in the trading business and at the same time trying to make it our main source of revenue from the very beginning.
Those two are hard to reconcile and we need to make a choice. The trading business can be and will be our main source of revenue but not at this initial stage when we are in the middle of this difficult process of jump-starting liquidity.

We all agree that we need to earn profit somewhere to maintain the referral program. And if we cannot rely on trading for generating enough revenue (at this initial stage), there is only one option left: we need to charge extra on our non-core business which is money transfers.

So keep the transfers fees high as they are now. Let them carry the weight of keeping us profitable at this stage. And let us take advantage of this situation: if a BTS user has a valid reason to make a transfer he will make the transfer no matter if it costs $0.20 or $0.05. His main concern is not the transfer fee but whether a SmartCoin can be easily converted to fiat without incurring a big spread. So the conversion spread is the crux of the matter here, not the transfer fee. And to keep the conversion spread low, we need to have healthy liquidity, which brings us back to the realization that the trading business is sacred so it cannot be expected to be highly profitable at this initial stage.

To sum it up: the trading business is our sacred cow and we must not try to milk it too early before it has a chance to mature a bit.

If BTS users keep crying about high transfer fees - so be it. Those users are not crucial at this stage, we can survive without them (while we cannot survive without traders & trading bots).
It's a bit tough but currently we are not in a position to please everyone.

[tonyk]

I think Bytemaster was very clear that there is no intention to reduce profitability of DAC. The point is to think how much and when we can collect fees so that users are still paying enough but don't have a negative experience.

Yes, experience has taught me to ask exactly how BM is planning to do something, after a vague and general statement like that. His intentions are always good, his decisions 15-20% of the time are...

[jakub]

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,19749.30.html have you read this?

Maybe it's because I'm on tapatalk but your link send me to the forum homepage.

I think @carpet ride meant this post by BM:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,19749.msg254574.html#msg254574

[Samupaha]

I think Bytemaster was very clear that there is no intention to reduce profitability of DAC. The point is to think how much and when we can collect fees so that users are still paying enough but don't have a negative experience.

[julian1]

  revenue and incentives are essential to help Bitshares grow.

[fav]

  at least I'm not the only one

[tonyk]

I would urge the community to keep transfer fees in the US the same.  I think regional pricing is a good idea. 

As someone who is building a real US-based payments business on top of Bitshares the transfer fees are important to keep the business sustainable.   Otherwise it will probably take hundreds of millions of VC money, hundreds of millions of users, 10 years to even get the cash flow in the black, much less pay back the cost of capital.  Free or close to free is not a great business model unless you plan to show a 30-sec video ad before you send every payment.  I'm certainly not interested in pursuing a business like this.  I would argue without the payments side, the exchange side is far less valuable. 

We shouldn't compete with other cryptos on cost.  Bitcoin and other cryptos are already essentially 'free'.  But ask yourself how are business that build on those ecosystems going to grow?  What is the revenue business model of anyone who builds on other cryptos?  I would tell you most have no sustainable business model. 

We can do well with peer to peer payments, but this should be a secondary focus because the perception and reality for the mainstream public is that payments are already free.  I would even recommend Venmo, Square cash, traditional online bank transfers via email/phone # as much better solutions for the average consumer.  I'm saying this as a competitor to those payment solutions.  We are naturally going to need and get a good % of unbanked, anti-bank, be-your-own-bank crowd that don't like traditional solutions and the fees aren't going to be a deal breaker.

We should be focused on merchants.  They are desperate for a solution because they have to pay 3 - 8% transaction fees,  annual/monthly fees,  hidden fees,  and deal with the headache of chargebacks.   When I tell merchants the cost for them is  20 cents  they are immediately sold.  The question I get from merchants is why and how are we so cheap?  I got a question from a merchant (who actually worked in payment processing before) about if we are going to be around in the future because 20 cents doesn't sound sustainable for any payment business.   I agree.   I assume if we want we can structure payments so that merchants are 'paying' the cost so that should allow users to feel like they aren't paying anything in transaction fees. 

I think low transfer fees will also render the referral system ineffective.   There would be very little reason to upgrade memberships and people won't be incentivized by getting a few cents trickling in each month from referrals.

 
I am with this guy.

On the other thread I did not really get why we have to lower all other fees if we are trying to attract traders? Seems like a contradiction, doesn't it?

[EstefanTT]

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,19749.30.html have you read this?

Maybe it's because I'm on tapatalk but your link send me to the forum homepage.

[EstefanTT]

I think the idea of BM has been misunderstood.

The idea is to restructure the fees system so the user has not the feeling that when you use BitShares you are all the time having to pay fees. Which is a good think.

The plan is not to disable all fees. We still need to make the blockchain profitable.

If you used a small % on filled order and no fees on creating orders and cancelled orders, you end up producing more money in fees. The trader is happy because he feel like it's cheap, BitShares produce more fees and the referrer wins more .... win-win-win !

Let's wait and see what BM propose as new structure, I'm sure it's gonna be well thought

[carpet ride]

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,19749.30.html have you read this?

[merivercap]

Hey guys.  Just listened to the mumble session and I do understand that eliminating many of the fees can help improve some perceptions of our ecosystem, but it is extremely important for us to maintain transfer fees!  It is important to have a sustainable business model for both of our core value propositions as a decentralized exchange and as a Smartcoin payment platform.  The referral system is the main driving force and incentive structure to enable us to bring blockchain technology mainstream as a payment platform and that's the main purpose of BitCash, our hosted wallet solution.  We want to bring blockchain/Bitcoin technology to the millions!

In any case, I urge the community to support keeping transfer fees.  We can eliminate memo fees for simplicity and also try to find a solution for regional pricing, but the 20 cent tranfer fees for the US is appropriate.  Please show your support on this thread to keep transfer fees and help us as a company and we as a community to keep the incentives that can bring Bitshares to the millions!