poll for the "1 BTS for transfer" proposal

[wallace]

 

apperciated your hard work for bitshares, bitcrab.

I always support to lower the fee just because our current situation is far from making profit. no user, no profit. referral system is useless under this situation. if you want the referral system work, lower the fee is the right choice now, maybe half a year later we can start to higher the fee if we have enough real users.

[fav]

thanks for keeping the weekly "fee" thread rate steady

[bitcrab]

The "1 BTS for transfer" idea comes from the discussion on BSIP#10(persent based transfer fee) in China community.

The budget for working on implementing BSIP#10 is at least 3M BTS, on the other hand, currently the average daily transfer volume is about 300, then each day the network get 300*30*20% = 1800 BTS for transfer, which means based on current transfer volume level it will cost 4.5 years for network to get back the 3M fund.

Then what sense does it make to do such a change? considering the solution is not perfect with some uncertainty.

You may say that after BSIP#10 being implemented we can set a big max limit for smartcoin transfer. but do you mean the shareholders are funding a project in order to being charged more?

You may say that after BSIP#10 being implemented the transfer volume will grow greatly. if that's true, then just lowering the transfer fee to lowest will also lead to great volume growing, without paying for development.

With the discussion going deeper, finally we reach some conclusion:

1.The core idea is, as a DAC, Bitshares' goal is not to make more network money, its task is to provide an advanced, convenient and attractive and cheap platform, meanwhile provide chance and tools for every player here to make money.

2.Keeping high transfer fee and meanwhile putting much fund on refining the fee structure is the wrong way, we should move to the right way -  go back to the global lowest tranfer fee scheme.

3.The referral program does not fit Bitshares, we need to eliminate its bad effect.

There are some good referral program design in Internet times, one example is DIDI(a Uber-like company in China), when one user finish one order, he/she share his inviting code to his friends and get some cashback(have been 5-10CNY), and the friend can also save about 5-10 CNY while using DIDI next time with the code. everyone is happy and the marketing is succesful, surely DIDI will pay for this, but it worth to pay.

Comparing to this, the Bitshares referral program is of bad design. in essence it just let the referral pay to the referrer. I don't think there's referral be happy when he/she understand this clearly. and the observed facts showed this referral program does not work.

The other more serious effect of referral program + high fee policy is that it hurt Bitshares' reputation. now in China blockchain/cryptocurrency community, Bitshares is tagged with "greed and uncertainty", it's  difficult to ask one team to do some BTS relevant business. The policy also conflict with the opensource culture.

The most valuable asset we should cherish is the support and trust from the community, if we neglect the feeling of investors and new users but enjoy calculating the thousands BTS of transfer fees everyday. we are picking little but losing big, be friendly to the investors and new users and they will ruturn more.

When I wrote this there are 1,061,001,603 BTS in reserve pool, these money can support a little team several years. we should not worry too much on the "who maintain and develop" question.

Yes, maybe current Bitshares referral program work in some region under some special scenarios, but I haven't saw it work, meanwhile I saw it hurt a big group, so here the point is, we should split the fundamantal service and the upper layer application, the fundamantal service is global and basic and should be cheap enough - yes, transfer of everything and some other basic services are defined as fundamantal service here. on the other hand, deposit/withdraw, FBA, UIA, privatized smartcoin business and more customized service should be defined as upper layer applications, gateways and business partners should develop business and make profits with these upper layer applications,they will compete with each other and the best service provider will make most profit. Then under this fundamantal-upper layer infrastructure every player can play freely and design business model by themselves without disturbing each other.   

So I am considring to create a committee proposal -surely following the defined process- to set the transfer fee to 1 BTS, a simple solution to end the long time debate and open a new start.

Here I raise this poll to collect opinion from community. please let me know how you think.

I know that jakub, xeroc and abit has worked a lot for BSIP#10 and now it's on halfway, if my "1 BTS for transfer" proposal can be approved later, their time will be wasted. I am sorry on this but I believe I am doing the right thing, as from the discussion in the community I don't think BSIP#10 will lead to a satisfactory consequence.

Change or not? Let voting decide.