poll for the "1 BTS for transfer" proposal

[jakub]

Actually not. I agree with that lower fee does not attract many transactions.

However, as we see now, high fee can drive out some business models. It's not inclusive. If we can only support a single business model - based on referral program, can we have as many as services compared to when we have lower fee system?

That's interesting from purely logical point of view.
That would logically mean that a business can collapse because the income from fees has increased while the number of transactions has not dropped.

Come on @clayop , the assumption about the existence of a significant correlation between transfer fees and the number of transactions is the foundation of your (and bitcrab's) argument.
Otherwise I don't know what we are talking about. Why would you want "1 BTS for transfer" if it doesn't translate (in your eyes) into generating more transactions?

[xeroc]

Actually, you are correct. The are defined by the committee:

      "network_percent_of_fee": 2000,
      "lifetime_referrer_percent_of_fee": 3000,

This totals to 50%.
Who gets the other 50%?

20% go to network .. ALWAYS.
the other parameters, not sure what it does

not sure what that parameter is a global parameters because every account has its own
"lifetime_referrer_fee_percentage"
it seems to be a default value defined in the chain's config that get's overwritten on every account creation ..

[xeroc]

Just one point too: the success of referral program is not determined by the fee level, but by how many times people use BTS system.

With lower fees, you can make enough referral income, if your customers use BTS system actively. Why do you think low fee hurts your business? Please give me the number.

I was not talking about referral income, but of STEALTH income. Why would anyone use STEALTH at a premium fee for small purchases from a mobile wallet, or for small transfers of funds?

Stealth must have much higher fee than basic transfer I think.

I see it the same. *IF* there is a proposal that reduces the transfer fee .. It should definitely be in combination of raising the 3x factor for blind transfers to whatever it needs to be to stay where it currently is.
As for Ken's business model: I have the opinion that a business should never focus merely on the income from referrals. Simple due to the fact that this income in is in the hands of others and difficult to calculate with. I am sure Ken can make some nice profit by selling the product as well.
Ronny certainly can make quite a bit of money by the advanced (possibly LTM-only) features of the DAC.

But in the end, this is all quite difficult multi-dimensional optimization and I have the feeling that we can only fail unless we have more data, ... or .. we are brave, pick a new schedule and try to get the baby of the ground with it for 6 months (of course while keeping existing buddies within reach)

It seems the biggest question to solve now is:

Do we experiment with the fee schedule ...
a) now
b) later
c) never

Personally, I prefer "now" simply because market cap is low, not many businesses exist and we certainly have not so many users to loose.
But that of course is just my opinion. I won't dare put anything up to vote that has not been put tons of thoughts into!

[jakub]

I've proposed to settle this debate by making the referral program fully optional.

We need to sort out these two:
- why does there need to be vesting on LTM?
- why does 20% of LTM go to the network?

If both are unnecessary, they need to be removed.

*IF* the above is true, we effectively end up with a fully optional referral program which can satisfy every party involved:

- If you think the referral program is beneficial to your business: use it as it is now.
- If you think the referral program is hurting your business and you want to offer low transfer fees to your customers by default: offer LTM to your customers for free (i.e. while registering a new account for your customer, upgrade it to LTM by default)
- If you are somewhere in between: offer LTM to your customers at a discount (i.e. offer a partial refund of the LTM fee).

Simple. Am I missing something?

[clayop]

Just one point too: the success of referral program is not determined by the fee level, but by how many times people use BTS system.

With lower fees, you can make enough referral income, if your customers use BTS system actively. Why do you think low fee hurts your business? Please give me the number.

Over and over again, you keep making this assumption: low transfer fees = high number of users.
If this assumption is false (i.e. the correlation between transfer fees and number of users is weak) your whole argument collapses.

Actually not. I agree with that lower fee does not attract many transactions.

However, as we see now, high fee can drive out some business models. It's not inclusive. If we can only support a single business model - based on referral program, can we have as many as services compared to when we have lower fee system?

[clayop]

Just one point too: the success of referral program is not determined by the fee level, but by how many times people use BTS system.

With lower fees, you can make enough referral income, if your customers use BTS system actively. Why do you think low fee hurts your business? Please give me the number.

I was not talking about referral income, but of STEALTH income. Why would anyone use STEALTH at a premium fee for small purchases from a mobile wallet, or for small transfers of funds?

Stealth must have much higher fee than basic transfer I think.

[jakub]

Just one point too: the success of referral program is not determined by the fee level, but by how many times people use BTS system.

With lower fees, you can make enough referral income, if your customers use BTS system actively. Why do you think low fee hurts your business? Please give me the number.

Over and over again, you keep making this assumption: low transfer fees = high number of users.
If this assumption is false (i.e. the correlation between transfer fees and number of users is weak) your whole argument collapses.

[onceuponatime]

Just one point too: the success of referral program is not determined by the fee level, but by how many times people use BTS system.

With lower fees, you can make enough referral income, if your customers use BTS system actively. Why do you think low fee hurts your business? Please give me the number.

I was not talking about referral income, but of STEALTH income. Why would anyone use STEALTH at a premium fee for small purchases from a mobile wallet, or for small transfers of funds?

[clayop]

Just one point too: the success of referral program is not determined by the fee level, but by how many times people use BTS system.

With lower fees, you can make enough referral income, if your customers use BTS system actively. Why do you think low fee hurts your business? Please give me the number.

[kenCode]

Micro-transactions and users who would only be attracted by very low fees can still be accommodated by a percentage based fee with min and max caps.

 

[onceuponatime]

The referral program was debated, very extensively , and decided upon, quite a long time ago. As were the fees necessary to make it profitable.

If bttcrab subsequently made a business that cannot operate profitably under the agreed upon conditions, it is up to him to tweak his business model to make it profitable. Otherwuse he forces ronny at ccedk, and Ken and Data with their business models that had expected to profit from referrals, to change theirs. And I, who had invested a large amount to get STEALTH developed with the understanding that fees would be sufficient to recover my investment within my lifetime, will be royally screwed by low fixed transfer fees.

I agree that nothing is new. We have had this same transfer fee schedule for months now.

Right now a regular transfer is 30bts and a LTM is 6BTS
Under stealth we would be looking at 3X  which I understand to be 90BTS and a LTM is 18BTS

At present transaction levels of roughly 200 transfers a day. Lets assume that Stealth brings in others that doubles that. I think overall at the current BTS market cap you would be looking at a return of about $200 a month give or take. If the fees were to come down by say a factor of 10, would we see greater adoption by a factor of 10? Could we see 2000 users of stealth instead of 200? It's not unreasonable to think so since lower fees can be more attractive. Of course we need to get to 40,000 users of stealth to make it more viable in this situation instead of just 4000 at the current rates.

Suppose with stealth now the refer people have a NEW feature to SELL... what if we manage to get setup next as a bitcoin sidechain where people can store their BTC in bitshares network and trade on the DEX AND get to use stealth features to give them increased privacy over what they can get in bitcoin? Another feature or refers to SELL. Are 40k users more likely in this scenario?

I think part of the challenge we face here is that we really don't know what is coming in 30 60 or 90 days from now for Bitshares aside from a handful of unfinished projects that none of us really know will produce any sort of results to the likes of the increased users or transactions as I just suggested. I think if we could get some sense for growth to be seen/had from reduced fees or keeping them the same it would be helpful. At this point though we are all just taking best guesses.

I also think @Empirical1.2 made a good point that you can increase the fee as you see fit if a decreased fee is going to have a strong impact. Which I think is another exciting aspect of FBAs.. though I don't know if it is something that is easily adjustable.

Just one point:  It is my opinion that any increase of adopters that is due to reducing fees to a very low rate will NOT consist of those likely to use a premium priced STEALTH feature for their transactions 

Micro-transactions and users who would only be attracted by very low fees can still be accommodated by a percentage based fee with min and max caps.

[puppies]

A business should NEVER EVER be profitable out of the referral program alone. Especially if you are a gateway and only interested in one particular feature of the DAC, namely 'transfer_operation's

What do you mean by that?  Shouldn't 90%+ of businesses depend on the referral program?  All the blog/affiliate/marketing businesses should be the largest in number and should be the main focus for user growth.

Also we're a wallet/gateway business.  We can produce a great product, but we can't charge a fee on top of the network fee.  We can charge a monthly software-as-a-service (SaaS) fee, but that limits options.  (The easiest way is probably just to allow any business to add a fee on top of a basic network fee for any asset on the network.)   The referral revenue is actually a proxy for income.  We can take our product and sell it to people and merchants who are willing to pay 1% per tx.  However that entire 1% would normally go to the network the way it's set up and if we didn't have a referral program, but that doesn't make sense for any business.  Normally a network platform might charge 0.2% and the business would profit 0.8%.  Businesses should be able to charge as low as .21% and as high as 3%.  The whole Mode A/B/C options is a roundabout way of achieving this flexibility.   One way is probably just to allow businesses to add an extra fee layer on top of all assets (privatized/public Smartcoins, FBAs, UIAs)... might be complicated to link accounts to assets to add a fee layer, so right now the referral income is a sufficient proxy.

Since you are operating a wallet you can require whatever fee you want.  This can be over and above the fee required by the network. 

Lets say a user is making a transfer.  The user is non LTM and you are the referrer.  When your wallet builds the transaction it can add 30BTS rather than the 3bts required by the network.  In that case the network would take 6bts, and 24 bts would go to the referrer of the user. 

Hope that makes sense.

[BunkerChainLabs-DataSecurityNode]

The referral program was debated, very extensively , and decided upon, quite a long time ago. As were the fees necessary to make it profitable.

If bttcrab subsequently made a business that cannot operate profitably under the agreed upon conditions, it is up to him to tweak his business model to make it profitable. Otherwuse he forces ronny at ccedk, and Ken and Data with their business models that had expected to profit from referrals, to change theirs. And I, who had invested a large amount to get STEALTH developed with the understanding that fees would be sufficient to recover my investment within my lifetime, will be royally screwed by low fixed transfer fees.

I agree that nothing is new. We have had this same transfer fee schedule for months now.

Right now a regular transfer is 30bts and a LTM is 6BTS
Under stealth we would be looking at 3X  which I understand to be 90BTS and a LTM is 18BTS

At present transaction levels of roughly 200 transfers a day. Lets assume that Stealth brings in others that doubles that. I think overall at the current BTS market cap you would be looking at a return of about $200 a month give or take. If the fees were to come down by say a factor of 10, would we see greater adoption by a factor of 10? Could we see 2000 users of stealth instead of 200? It's not unreasonable to think so since lower fees can be more attractive. Of course we need to get to 40,000 users of stealth to make it more viable in this situation instead of just 4000 at the current rates.

Suppose with stealth now the refer people have a NEW feature to SELL... what if we manage to get setup next as a bitcoin sidechain where people can store their BTC in bitshares network and trade on the DEX AND get to use stealth features to give them increased privacy over what they can get in bitcoin? Another feature or refers to SELL. Are 40k users more likely in this scenario?

I think part of the challenge we face here is that we really don't know what is coming in 30 60 or 90 days from now for Bitshares aside from a handful of unfinished projects that none of us really know will produce any sort of results to the likes of the increased users or transactions as I just suggested. I think if we could get some sense for growth to be seen/had from reduced fees or keeping them the same it would be helpful. At this point though we are all just taking best guesses.

I also think @Empirical1.2 made a good point that you can increase the fee as you see fit if a decreased fee is going to have a strong impact. Which I think is another exciting aspect of FBAs.. though I don't know if it is something that is easily adjustable.

[merivercap]

Ok.  Might as well bring up the inevitable.

What about trading fees?  Shouldn't we just have the same fee schedule for that too?  Wouldn't it be easier to just have a Mode A/B/C work the same for trading fees? 

I think Mode B allows exchange businesses to have pricing similar to centralized exchanges and charge around 0.2% per trade which is good.  The bigger question is what is the revenue model for exchanges in the first place?  I've focused on the payments side and the referral program so I haven't thought a lot about exchanges, but what compels an exchange business to use the Bitshares platform?   If an exchange like Kraken wanted to use the Bitshares platform and charge ~0.2% per trade as they currently do how would it work?

[Akado]

Where's bitcrab's plan then? What does he intend to do? How does he intend getting more users? What plan can he shows us that his business model can outcompete OpenLedger? That way people might consider him. Until then, they won't.

what bitcrab have done for BTS?
he is the fiat gateway for bitCNY
look at bitCNY and bitUSD market, it's bitcrab  who make bitCNY peg CNY more better.
he had develop a whole system,  exchange from bitCNY to fiatCNY automaticly.
and he never asked for 1 BTS from community.
before bitcrab, gulu is the gateway for fiatCNY, but his business is manual, bad user experience, and community have give a 100% delegate to  sponsor gulu.

also, bitcrab have ask btc38 to accept bitCNY, TCNY
he have ask yunbi to accept bitCNY also, but had been refused, because they don't want to spent more time for BTS, they have lose interesting for BTS.

and bitcrab have try to find a USD fiat gateway
and maybe many other things I don't know

No replies on this post :p
Cannot rebut?

lol this is the kind of comments that lead people into useless attacks against each other. I simply didn't see it.

I didn't ask what he has done. I asked what is he going to do. What's his plan. Alt didn't understand my question giving a reply that has nothing to do with what I asked (it happens) an I still get provoked? I really hope you didn't do this on purpose and was simply a joke, which is fine, otherwise these kind of comments are useless and only contribute to unnecessary discussions. If I reacted like Ken I would already be flaming and turning this into a fight.

I could argue the same about other questions that have been asked but that would simply be childish.

So I will ask again. What is his plan in the future with the lower fees? And to be even more specific, this is not an rhetoric question aiming to insult his business plan or understimate it, I merely want to know what he plans to do. Continue with what he has done so far or take advantage of the lower fees to do something else?

I know this is strectching it but assuming he has good relationship with chinese exchanges, with lower fees does he intend on trying to convince them to run on top of BitShares like OpenLedger? Given that lower fees could open the door for that.

Your question makes no sense to me. What is the better plan than making the current business profitable (or at least out of danger)? Other guys can give you a good plan because their business has not started yet. But bitcrab's business is running now, and in danger. If this continues, the next plan will be closing the business I think.

How come it doesn't make any sense? I asked a simple question, that he is free to answer to or not. It's pretty simple. If does he intend on doing something more with the help of lower trading fees. Is it that hard to understand? You're making a fuss where there is none.

What doesn't make sense is your reply. I ask what is the business plan and you reply me "What is the better plan than making the current business profitable " lol. You know that's every single businesses' goal?

Being profitable is not a business plan. How to make it profitable is the business plan. That's what I asked.

From your reply I take it it is to continue to provide the same service, only better since fees are lower. That's all good, I just asked if there's something more to it, it with lower fees he can do more and if he has a plan to do more?

Although he might not want to reply or his reply might just be "continue doing what I do" my question is perfectly legit and makes perfect sense.

What doesn't make sense is you being caught up on trying to forcefully defend him because you seem "threatened" by the questions I'm asking. You're on defensive mode, thinking I'm questioning his abilities to run a business or that I'm insinuating his plan is not good enough.

Like I said, you're so caught up trying to defend your point of view you're not seeing things correctly. You're worrying to much in defending it when my question is perfectly legit and didn't insinuate anything.

And now like I said we're having useless arguments. Why? Because you're not interpreting things right due to being completely biased  and by that I can only assume you're not really trying to make an effort to give in a little and reach consensus, which is the sole purpose of this debate. Reaching a common ground. W

Can't argue with people like this. I will take my own conclusions. and by the way, the fact I won't be replying to this thread anymore, once again, doesn't mean I can't rebut  I can see more other than my own belly.

Either put it up to  vote or continue arguing for the following 20 pages. Have fun trying to reach a consensus.