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

[carpet ride]

Reduce the transfer fee if you must, but do not reduce it to 0, you kill the the merchants, the normal users and the wallet providers with that. There must be incentive to use the referral program for transfers for a functioning eco-system.

Merchants may be able to choose their fee structure regardless of the blockchain fee.  They have 30c plus 3% to play with.  The question may be do merchants really need the referral program or will they be happy enough being able to play with the additional margin.

[mindphlux]

I think traders will make up 70-80% of users for bitshares.  The exchange is what gives bts value, and it needs to be tailored for traders.  There really isn't a reason for Joe sixpack to use bts just for moving money around.

Yes, there is. He can hold USD, EUR, GBP without counterparty risk and use it like paypal with compatible merchants. Those merchants save fees and thus can offer discounts. He can even refer users to his wallet provider and gets a profit cut. He can also buy GOLD or SILVER within the same wallet and store his wealth inside BTS.

It's still a long stretch, but this is where we want to be heading.

If you cut the transfer fee, none of this will happen, and BTS will remain to be suited to traders only, and not Joe sixpack. Reducing fees is always possible, raising them in the future to have a sustainble referral program for normal users is a big PR disaster, and should be avoided at all costs.

EDIT:
No transfer fee - no incentive for wallet providers to open shop, and nobody refers joe sixpack users then, and thus no merchants too since there is no userbase. No need to have a referral program then too, since the product has no users except traders. No users = NO NETWORK EFFECT!

Reduce the transfer fee if you must, but do not reduce it to 0, you kill the the merchants, the normal users and the wallet providers with that. There must be incentive to use the referral program for transfers for a functioning eco-system.

[wallace]

I think that adding the referral system to the trading fees is a good idea, so the referral can earn money when one of their referred users trades. However, in the realworld  only maybe 1-2% of all users are active traders, the rest are casual users.

Please tell me, if the transfer fee is set to next to zero - what is the incentive for a wallet/payment provider to refer new users?

Casual users (98% of the userbase) are only interested in using their wallet to transfer money around, much like Paypal. They use their wallet to pay Merchants.

Under the new system, it's almost impossible to sustain a wallet/payment provider business. Only 2% of all referred users by this wallet provider are traders, the rest will only use the "money transfer" option.

In my opinion, we still need a sizeable transfer fees, not nescessary 20 cents, but it should be at least 5-10 cents so a wallet provider has an incentive to run its business.

Also, under the current system, people have an incentive to buy a lifetime upgrade, and the referral gets parts of this too. The fee must be high enough that the user is still incentivized to buy their LT upgrade.

How will we get main stream users when there's no incentive to run a wallet/payment service for the common users? I'm not talking about traders.

for a well-established non-crypto world product, you're right, only 2% users are active traders. but face the reality, we're talking about a crypto world, except the active users in our forum, I would say over 50% users are traders. I know our target is the real world not a crypto world, but we need step by step. we need strategy to sell our product to the real world.

[lil_jay890]

I think that adding the referral system to the trading fees is a good idea, so the referral can earn money when one of their referred users trades. However, in the realworld  only maybe 1-2% of all users are active traders, the rest are casual users.

Please tell me, if the transfer fee is set to next to zero - what is the incentive for a wallet/payment provider to refer new users?

Casual users (98% of the userbase) are only interested in using their wallet to transfer money around, much like Paypal. They use their wallet to pay Merchants.

Under the new system, it's almost impossible to sustain a wallet/payment provider business. Only 2% of all referred users by this wallet provider are traders, the rest will only use the "money transfer" option.

In my opinion, we still need a sizeable transfer fees, not nescessary 20 cents, but it should be at least 5-10 cents so a wallet provider has an incentive to run its business.

Also, under the current system, people have an incentive to buy a lifetime upgrade, and the referral gets parts of this too. The fee must be high enough that the user is still incentivized to buy their LT upgrade.

How will we get main stream users when there's no incentive to run a wallet/payment service for the common users? I'm not talking about traders.

I think traders will make up 70-80% of users for bitshares.  The exchange is what gives bts value, and it needs to be tailored for traders.  There really isn't a reason for Joe sixpack to use bts just for moving money around.

[mindphlux]

I think that adding the referral system to the trading fees is a good idea, so the referral can earn money when one of their referred users trades. However, in the realworld  only maybe 1-2% of all users are active traders, the rest are casual users.

Please tell me, if the transfer fee is set to next to zero - what is the incentive for a wallet/payment provider to refer new users?

Casual users (98% of the userbase) are only interested in using their wallet to transfer money around, much like Paypal. They use their wallet to pay Merchants.

Under the new system, it's almost impossible to sustain a wallet/payment provider business. Only 2% of all referred users by this wallet provider are traders, the rest will only use the "money transfer" option.

In my opinion, we still need a sizeable transfer fees, not nescessary 20 cents, but it should be at least 5-10 cents so a wallet provider has an incentive to run its business.

Also, under the current system, people have an incentive to buy a lifetime upgrade, and the referral gets parts of this too. The fee must be high enough that the user is still incentivized to buy their LT upgrade.

How will we get main stream users when there's no incentive to run a wallet/payment service for the common users? I'm not talking about traders.

[jakub]

Everyone claiming Bm didn't communicate is full of it.  He clearly stated that order matching fees were reserved for asset issuers to incentivize them. Bts has a 0% trading fee and it has been that way in every test net. Just because you didn't know doesn't mean it was not communicated many times in many ways.

We cannot treat forum posts as official source of information for our business partners.
Business people do not have time & resources to follow every post on this forum.

[Akado]

I was hoping to purchase a metatrader 4 trading license and configuring it to work with bitshares. I wanted to make the platform free to use and collect money from trading fees by being the referrer of each account.  Sounds like that business model is a non starter since trading fees don't go to the referrer??

See above. It seems the plan is to make trading fees go to the referrer.

[sittingduck]

The plan is to change it so that trading fees go to referrer.  Currently the order create and cancel fees go to referrer

[lil_jay890]

I was hoping to purchase a metatrader 4 trading license and configuring it to work with bitshares. I wanted to make the platform free to use and collect money from trading fees by being the referrer of each account.  Sounds like that business model is a non starter since trading fees don't go to the referrer??

[vlight]

I haven't exactly followed everything about BTS in the past months. But today when i tried to transfer BTS between my accounts i had a WTF moment when discovered 40 bts fee for a transfer between my accounts. If i have found this absurdity earlier i might have dumped this whole thing. This is like the stupidest idea second only to merger.

So you paid $0.15 for the service of moving your funds from one account to another.
I think your time devoted to write this post was worth more than the amount you are crying about.

It is. I'm providing the feedback. No micros-transactions is complete bs. imo anyway

[sittingduck]

Everyone claiming Bm didn't communicate is full of it.  He clearly stated that order matching fees were reserved for asset issuers to incentivize them.  Bts has a 0% trading fee and it has been that way in every test net.   Just because you didn't know doesn't mean it was not communicated many times in many ways.

[jakub]

I haven't exactly followed everything about BTS in the past months. But today when i tried to transfer BTS between my accounts i had a WTF moment when discovered 40 bts fee for a transfer between my accounts. If i have found this absurdity earlier i might have dumped this whole thing. This is like the stupidest idea second only to merger.

So you paid $0.15 for the service of moving your funds from one account to another.
I think your time devoted to write this post was worth more than the amount you are crying about.

[Akado]

I still am a bit confused why trading fees were not part of the referral program as it stands now, that was a bit surprising to find out yesterday since I read these pages and no where got the impression that trading fees are not considered 'transaction fees'.

https://bitshares.org/technology/referral-rewards-program/
https://bitshares.org/referral-program/
https://bitshares.org/referral-program-terms-and-conditions/

The total trading volume in BTS is about $100K  (recently) meaning the network could be earning $150 per day or $54,000 per year just by moving all BTS trading on chain.   
If we can get the daily volume on the exchange up to $1,000,000  (something BTS has achieved in the past) and simply sustain it then the network would be earning $540,000 per year  (6% yield) on current valuations. 
That is just the trading volume of BTS.   Throw in the trading volume of all the other assets on the BTS chain and the total volume of the exchange will be much higher.

Under the current referral program none of that money would be going to referrers.   Under the new referral program 80% of that money would be going to referrers. 

So which is going to generate more referral income?  Trading or Transfers?   To generate 540,000 per year from transfers would require a sustained 5 transfers per minute on the network.

What use case do you want to support, an exchange or a currency?

That means they're working on improving the referral system to include trading fees right?

[vlight]

I haven't exactly followed everything about BTS in the past months. But today when i tried to transfer BTS between my accounts i had a WTF moment when discovered 40 bts fee for a transfer between my accounts. If i have found this absurdity earlier i might have dumped this whole thing. This is like the stupidest idea second only to merger.

[clayop]

If we can implement percentage fee for each trade, and DEX has a high volume, revenue from trading fee will be much more than transfer fee.
In this case, why we have to keep transfer fee high and make customer's perception bad?

When you say "customer's perception" who is the customer? What kind of customer?  A trader? A merchant? Or an online consumer?
Each kind of them has a different business model and different incentives.
What's good for a merchant might be bad for a consumer and vice versa.

We need to be very specific and must not treat the customer concept as a big lump of people.

No customer dislikes lowering fees. Only shareholders care about it.

And your conclusion is?
I've asked a very simple question (who do you mean when you say "customer"?) and there seems to be no answer.

All types of customer except who are shareholders at the same time.