OK. I think I now get it.
My recent conclusion is that the referral program is *not* meant to be optional by design.
That's probably why we have this 90-day vesting - to make it hard to create a faucet giving out LTM accounts for free (or very cheaply) on a massive scale.
The LTM upgrade does several things at the same time:
- redirects fees from the referrer to the user
- offers the user access to advanced features
- it's the point where the network gets most of its revenue
Thus all three parties (i.e. the user, the referrer and the network) are integral parts of the LTM contract.
It's *not* a simple deal between the user and the referrer, as I previously thought.
So I guess only two things can be realistically done as slight improvements:
(1) Create a non-profit faucet (which voluntarily burns its referral income) for people like
@yvv - those who are willing to pay for LTM but they want their money to go straight to the network, not to some third-party.
(2) Remove the transfer fee from the LTM deal, as
@xeroc suggests, and rebrand LTM as a feature for *advanced* users (as opposed to *frequent* users).
Regarding (2): This will probably please people like
@alt and
@bitcrab to some extent but for businesses generally not dealing with advanced users on a daily basis (e.g. mobile app operators:
@kenCode @merivercap ) this change will make it much harder to sell LTM to their customers. Maybe LTM combined with percentage-based transfer fees will make more sense for their customers.
Also, we significantly weaken our sales pitch for online merchants. So for me, it's a mixed bag of good and bad consequences.