Reasons for Lowering Fees

[rgcrypto]

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.

[Empirical1.2]

@merivercap

How many merchants accept crypto payments without the additional services of a payment processor?

The transfer fee by itself may be competitive for merchants in isolation. The question is how easily & frequently can merchants get
BTS/Smartcoin payments into their traditional bank account and what is the total round-trip cost? That is the service you are competing with in the merchant space. 

BitShares/Partner would have to offer both a BitPay type competing service and do it for less than BitPay https://bitpay.com/pricing

Without that service you have limited value to most merchants.

[merivercap]

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.   

[Xeldal]

The hardest hit transfers obviously are smaller amounts.  Transfers under the $10 mark quickly approach a 50% fee.  Spending anything under $20 and your paying more than 1% in fees

if .1% were an acceptable fee that people wouldn't even think about.  every transfer over $200 would produce *more referral income than the current $.20 fee.

The fee on a 100 BTS tip would be only .1 but who would complain about a lower bound of 1 BTS fee for every transfer.  Or minimum $.03 fee so 8 BTS currently.

I wonder if we used the current history of transfers data and compared a $.20 fee vs a .1% fee which would produce greater referral income?

I think we could set an upper and lower bound to a percentage fee, but it seems to me to be more profitable as well as more accommodating to more market use-cases. (small transactions) 
 
What is the downside to a percentage based transfer fee with upper and lower bounds?
Does it produce more or less referral income?

say, no less than $.03, no more than $3 fee on transfers.   (markets would have no upper bound) or maybe just no upper bound at all.

perhaps even a .2% fee if need be.

[clayop]

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.

Bitcoin is not our main competitor... centralized exchanges are.  They have lower fees, but we have better security and transparency.  We need to sell that... unfortunately we will have no one to sell the product after the affiliate system is blown up with these changes.

I still have not seen any evidence that supports your theory that lowering the transfer fee will increase user transactions.

Yes, we have two businesses: payment business and exchange business. Bitcoin is regarding to the former.

Regarding exchange business, I provided some real world problems here, https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,19980.msg256944.html#msg256944

[lil_jay890]

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.

Bitcoin is not our main competitor... centralized exchanges are.  They have lower fees, but we have better security and transparency.  We need to sell that... unfortunately we will have no one to sell the product after the affiliate system is blown up with these changes.

I still have not seen any evidence that supports your theory that lowering the transfer fee will increase user transactions. 

[clayop]

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.

[jakub]

IMHO, all we need to get more liquidity is an API that compares to Poloniex's API. Our current API is not really useful to traders. That's why we don't see many bots etc ..
Once, the API is "nice", I would be happy to provide the infrastrucure similar to poloniex's api implementations to make bot writing as easy as running a webpage.
Actually, once the Api is more powerfull, we could easily add a bot infrastructure into the wallet and let people shop and execute 3rd party bots within the client.

Anyway.. in the short term, once the API is powerfull enough, providing liquidity for OPENBTC:bitBTC should be so easy that every community member can provide liquidity and earn some profit!

@xeroc if you are against the fee reduction, please remove your support for clayop and bitcrab.
Your proxy has 32 mln BTS so your vote makes a significant impact.

[tonyk]

Some active voting going on.[in BTS terms]... On both sides.

http://cryptofresh.com/
slow to update on vote tallies, though. and the gui [well at least mine] shows only counts for the active committee/witnesses

[pc]

(This might do a transfer to yourself and charge you a transfer fee I'm not sure.)

It doesn't transfer anything, it just updates your account metadata. And for that it charges a fee of (currently) 20 BTS.

[carpet ride]

@clayop I do believe both camps have the best interest of BTS at heart. Disagreeing on the path to achieve that better future is a GOOD thing!

@clayop, I also believe that you have the best intentions at heart but please note that by continuing this campaign your are effectively:
(a) breaking a social contract that was agreed in June.
(b) dismantling the emerging business ecosystem around BitShares 2.0.

Hopefully BM's vote will prevent this craziness but this is a very bad symptom of not being able to think outside one's own perspective.
Actually it's quite selfish and short-sighted.

This is bad and feels that it could well lead to a fork. Hopefully neither constituency walks out, but if it has to be done, I'm with the side that encourages marketers to build marketing tools.  Like ShareBot.

[jakub]

@clayop I do believe both camps have the best interest of BTS at heart. Disagreeing on the path to achieve that better future is a GOOD thing!

@clayop, I also believe that you have the best intentions at heart but please note that by continuing this campaign your are effectively:
(a) breaking a social contract that was agreed in June.
(b) dismantling the emerging business ecosystem around BitShares 2.0.

Hopefully BM's vote will prevent this craziness but this is a very bad symptom of not being able to think outside one's own perspective.
Actually it's quite selfish and short-sighted.

[Empirical1.2]

Any easy guide on how to vote for the reduction in fee? I had done some transfers but have no idea how to vote for anything.

In your account

- choose Voting on the left, type in clayop as a proxy voting account and publish the changes.
- Alternatively go to 'committee members' and type in clayop as a comittee member and also bitcrab. Both have proposals that support lower fees.

Thanks, it means I don't have to do any transfer?

Yes after you have selected them,  I think you have to choose 'publish changes', which updates your vote.

(This might do a transfer to yourself and charge you a transfer fee I'm not sure.)

[Fernandez]

Any easy guide on how to vote for the reduction in fee? I had done some transfers but have no idea how to vote for anything.

In your account

- choose Voting on the left, type in clayop as a proxy voting account and publish the changes.
- Alternatively go to 'committee members' and type in clayop as a comittee member and also bitcrab. Both have proposals that support lower fees.

Thanks, it means I don't have to do any transfer?

[tonyk]

Any easy guide on how to vote for the reduction in fee? I had done some transfers but have no idea how to vote for anything.

The simplest way to support the reduction is to set clayop as your proxy.

But please be advised that by doing so you are effectively eliminating the incentive for other people to explain & present BitShares to the outside world.

+ 1
I was about to post basically the same.

@clayop I do believe both camps have the best interest of BTS at heart. Disagreeing on the path to achieve that better future is a GOOD thing!