Author Topic: poll for the "1 BTS for transfer" proposal  (Read 78623 times)

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Offline yvv

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(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.


You have to study social mind though. If it is just me who wants this, you probably wouldn't want to bother.

jakub

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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.
« Last Edit: February 02, 2016, 12:47:38 pm by jakub »

Offline abit

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and I do get the other side as well -  selling something ( the 20% prepaid fees) and paying the promoter 80% ( 4x the price of the product itself) as an incentive for him, is more than odd, some might call it Ponzi/scam whatever.
So do not interpret this as me being in the LTM camp at all.
That's called "sales margin" (according to someone's post). When you buy a nice suit from a shop and paid $500, how much do you think the shop will earn (by promoting it)? Cost for the suit is perhaps less than $50.
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Offline xeroc

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Hence if an LTM is the referrer he can get 100%. 

Which is a very bad idea because it allows spamming at zero cost.

Offline xeroc

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20% go to network .. ALWAYS.

@xeroc , would you agree that if you are my referrer and after while I want to pay you off and become my own referrer, it's a deal between me and you. Nobody else is involved or affected, the income stream for the network is not affected.
Why on earth should the network be allowed to take a 20% cut in this private deal between me and you?
Just because somebody said "20% always goes to network"? It does not make sense in this case.
The network effectively steals 20% of the referrer's money.

IMO, it's logical error made by BM and it should be fixed.
As well as this absurd (so it seems) LTM 90-day vesting.

Don't you think you gain something FROM THE NETWORK aswell when you
upgrade to LTM? How about you can join committee, be worker, or create
your OWN accounts? Is that not a premium feature?

Furhter, the protocol can be changed such that other features may
require PREMIUM membership as well. You can think of those services:
- bond markets
- asset creations

and I can even think of new features to require LTM for the first 6
months. Like an exclusive right.

Offline merivercap

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The danger there is then everyone would get free LTM wherever it is offered and no one would pay anywhere else.
Initially this is what I thought as well. But now I think this is the way it should be!
The referral business should bring some added value to the user (e.g. education materials or a nice mobile app) - if it's not able to do that but just wants earn profit for doing nothing useful, it should go out of business.

And by the way, that's how it works in any other business.
If there is a retail shop that wants to operate without any profit margin, who can stop it?
I'm a big supporter of the referral program, provided it can economically justify its existence. If it cannot do that and it does nothing but keeps the prices high, it should die.

I agree with the general direction you're going and in the end it may not make a difference if some faucets use automatic upgrades by default, but I think keeping the membership structure for specific assets is a better option.  (Mode A/B/C)  The value of the referral is not so much ongoing education or a good UX although that helps a lot, it's just the fact that any user signs up and pays membership for whatever reason.   Also when someone pays for something they are invested and they have a higher probability of using the product even if it doesn't offer that much value.  Of course with Bitshares we shouldn't have to worry about the value part.  Membership is based on exclusivity, otherwise it really isn't a membership.  People may resent the fact that they really weren't paying for discounted fees if they didn't have to for the same product.    I would probably recommend the free LTM instead of selling membership and request a donation because the 'membership' is misleading.  It doesn't seem like that many people want to cut out the entire network fee anyways. 

Having Modes A/B/C just changes certain assets.  The committee can set rates.   It's easier to just add one extra Mode A for CNY assets and appease the Chinese community.  I think that's why they are supporting BSIP10.   Mode B & C can remain the same for US/Eur assets.   The world is happy. 

Instead of 20cents, LTM's pay 4 cents to the network so it was a way to recoup the difference.
Not true, IMO.
Both non-LTM and LTM users always pay 6 BTS (=20% of 30 BTS) to the network.
So there is no difference to be recouped.

@abit , could you confirm this^?

I just meant it was to offset some of the costs that a LTM would have paid if he/she were a basic member.  Essentially LTMs pay their fees up front and some goes back to the network.

Actually now I think the vesting is ok... It may prevent spam.  It may be good for the faucet/registrar to charge a minimal fee to prevent spam as well.  I can imagine some people just creating massive amounts of spam accounts as an attack.  I do think the network can lower the fee to 10%.  I think the minimum of the faucet can be 10%.  Both the network and faucet need to maintain infrastructure. 
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Offline tonyk

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But what about the situation when an affiliate / referrer (like bitcrab) wants to forgo his referral revenue entirely? Wouldn't it be fair if the company (or the BitShares network in our case) gave up its part of the revenue as well?

Isn't it a fair deal for everyone?


jakub... go ask Apple.. whoever actually

"Would you mind not making any profit at all, if I sell your product?"

Cause essentially the LTM-ship is paying for your product upfront, instead of gradually with normal fees.


and I do get the other side as well -  selling something ( the 20% prepaid fees) and paying the promoter 80% ( 4x the price of the product itself) as an incentive for him, is more than odd, some might call it Ponzi/scam whatever.
So do not interpret this as me being in the LTM camp at all.

PS
I should probably analyze this whole thing now after 50 28 pages of discussion... but from my pov the fees are such a none issue, you cannot imagine.
« Last Edit: February 02, 2016, 03:35:31 am by tonyk »
Lack of arbitrage is the problem, isn't it. And this 'should' solves it.

jakub

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Name one product sold on the internet via an affiliate network where  the company offering product gets nothing and the affiliate seller gets 100% of the sale. Not one. :) It doesn't make any sense for any business to do that.

OK, thanks for that. Your suggestion made me realize what my point really is.
I agree that it is fair that when an affiliate earns some revenue, so should the company that produced the product. In this case the current 80% / 20% makes sense.
But what about the situation when an affiliate / referrer (like bitcrab) wants to forgo his referral revenue entirely? Wouldn't it be fair if the company (or the BitShares network in our case) gave up its part of the revenue as well?

Thus we would have:
- Referrer wants to earn profit - we tax him 20%. This way the user gets more expensive product but also the added value supplied by the referrer.
- Referrer forgoes profit - we don't tax him at all. This way the user can get the pure product, without being forced to pay anything extra.

All that would be required to have this implemented is this: an option for the registrar to register a new account and make it LTM at the time of its creation.
This would effectively mean this: the referral business abstains from its right to be a referrer and at the same time the network abstains from the 20% LTM upgrade charge.

Isn't it a fair deal for everyone?


You all realize we are WAY off topic of this thread now? :)
I think we are very much on topic :)
We are trying to find a viable alternative to bitcrab's proposal.
« Last Edit: February 02, 2016, 02:58:56 am by jakub »

Offline yvv

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The network effectively steals 20% of the referrer's money.

I am sorry, but this is bullshit. It is opposite. Referrer steals 80% of network money. I would rather make a deal with network directly, rather than through ccedk, but I was not given a choice.
If you had read my posts more carefully, you'd have noticed that all I wanted was to make the referral program fully optional to satisfy people like you who don't feel like paying any third-party.
If you call this BS, so be it. I rest my case.

I confess, I don't read 100s of pages of bs on internet forums carefully. I skip most of them. I have a good job in real world, and it takes time and efforts. If you are proposing an alternative to this referral program, you have my support.

Offline BunkerChainLabs-DataSecurityNode

I do think network should profit (maybe not now but sooner or later we need it).
Currently the network need to pay out 43k BTS to witnesses and 80k BTS to workers every day, but average daily income is only 8k BTS or so, among it about 900 come from transfers, 6k come from account upgrades. If we decrease transfer fee for LTM from 6 BTS to 1 BTS, it means we need at least 6x volume to keep same revenue. If we decrease account upgrade fee to 0, it means we need 54x transfer volume to keep same revenue.

I see. In this case I agree. We cannot make a drastic change in this situation.
LTM 20% upgrade tax is our milk cow. It has no logical justification but it just happens to be our main source of revenue.

All we could do is lower the LTM upgrade tax to something like 10% and remove the 90-day vesting.
This would make the referral program easier to opt out, but still not fully optional.

I still think your outlook on this is a little jaded.

Name one product sold on the internet via an affiliate network where  the company offering product gets nothing and the affiliate seller gets 100% of the sale. Not one. :) It doesn't make any sense for any business to do that.

Or don't even consider it a product.. think about an affiliate network that hosts products for companies and provides the infrastructure for affiliates to get paid. The affiliate network gets a cut of all the transactions of every product that every affiliate sells. Never does the affiliate who does all the work get 100%.. Never.. Paypal gets their cut.. credit card companies get their cut.. whom ever is part of the transaction gets their cut.. as Bitshare the network/stakeholders should/can/will too.

Sure you can argue about ongoing fees etc, but we have already established those numbers are fractional in comparison. Sprinkles on the cake.

The rewards given to the promoter are not necessarily based out of the % of the sale they are getting but the amount of the compensation. Can they expect $50 per sale or $100 per sale? These are the numbers that promoters care about in order to fashion their campaigns and effectively optimize the conversion of traffic. What % of the sale they get means nothing to them otherwise. I know affiliate marketers who get paid $500 per product they sell that costs in the neighbourhood of $2500. They don't care about it costing $2500, they care only about the $500 they will get. The margins we are offering as far as % are already on the high scale of offers as well.

This does lead to an important question regarding how much LTMs should be sold for.

I am currently recommending they should be in the neighbourhood of $97. At the current 80% rate that would mean they can expect $77 per sale. Still running numbers to see if that is the most ideal sweet spot for now with all things considered.

I am also currently considering the potential of what you mentioned regarding going from 20% to 10% network. It could be a great way to increase the refer profitability in exchange of other fees possibly being reduced.

I agree with some of the other commentary as well in terms of adding more value to LTMs beyond just fee differences.

You all realize we are WAY off topic of this thread now? :)

I don't think we are going to see 1bts transfers for basic fees... however I do think we will see some kind of reduction.. just not to that level. The committee is still doing a thorough analysis of all the fees to determine the positive negative impact to everyone. It's not going to happen overnight, but at least it's becoming a more cohesive discussion.
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jakub

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I don't think that I have misunderstood you.

I just think that the network has every right to get 20% of the referral fee brought in by small (or large) marketing businesses that are given the opportunity created by us. Think of it as franchise fees if you like.

Some marketer can come in tomorrow and take advantage of the two years of sweat, tears  and treasure that we have poured into creating this platform while they were off making money marketing something else.

Do you not place any value on the creation of our platform?  I sure do.

Generally I agree with you. The platform should have its way to recoup "two years of sweat, tears etc". I fully support the network's right to have income.

What I find difficult to accept is the fact that we've made the LTM upgrade our only profit center, due to no particular reason.
The 20% tax by the network in this case is detached from the economical sense of this particular transaction.

We should spread our platform taxes more evenly. As we have it now, over 90% of our revenue comes from LTM upgrade. And this is bad.

Offline merivercap

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Just reading the Membership page on OL right now.  50% is split between affiliate and Registrar.  I guess the annual membership is no longer available?  Hmm.. I thought that was originally a good idea. $20 is an easier sell for membership than $100.  Can we implement the annual membership? (We can just make annual members have the same low fees for a year to make it simple?) 
I don't want to comment on other things, but this.. annual membership is intended to be available, but there seems to be a bug so it's actually not available. See https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,21163.0.html

Thanks.  Yeah we should be configuring a faucet soon so it would be good to know. 

Looking at that thread I do see a membership expiration for woodygar, but  the  "referrer_rewards_percentage" seems to be associated with the affiliate % which is set to 0 currently.  Reading: https://bitshares.org/referral-program/   it says up to 50%  so my guess is that OL as the registrar currently has it set at 0% for annual members unfortunately.   My thought now is that annual membership actually refers to the affiliate % ( "referrer_rewards_percentage" ) and everyone has to at least be an annual member to get any referral rewards.   This all seems to make sense now.  There should be an update on OL GUI to say that annual members get the affiliate %, otherwise it's confusing. 
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jakub

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The network effectively steals 20% of the referrer's money.

I am sorry, but this is bullshit. It is opposite. Referrer steals 80% of network money. I would rather make a deal with network directly, rather than through ccedk, but I was not given a choice.
If you had read my posts more carefully, you'd have noticed that all I wanted was to make the referral program fully optional to satisfy people like you who don't feel like paying any third-party.
If you call this BS, so be it. I rest my case.

jakub

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I do think network should profit (maybe not now but sooner or later we need it).
Currently the network need to pay out 43k BTS to witnesses and 80k BTS to workers every day, but average daily income is only 8k BTS or so, among it about 900 come from transfers, 6k come from account upgrades. If we decrease transfer fee for LTM from 6 BTS to 1 BTS, it means we need at least 6x volume to keep same revenue. If we decrease account upgrade fee to 0, it means we need 54x transfer volume to keep same revenue.

I see. In this case I agree. We cannot make a drastic change in this situation.
LTM 20% upgrade tax is our milk cow. It has no logical justification but it just happens to be our main source of revenue.

All we could do is lower the LTM upgrade tax to something like 10% and remove the 90-day vesting.
This would make the referral program easier to opt out, but still not fully optional.

Offline yvv

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The network effectively steals 20% of the referrer's money.

I am sorry, but this is bullshit. It is opposite. Referrer steals 80% of network money. I would rather make a deal with network directly, rather than through ccedk, but I was not given a choice.