Estimate of the dividends

[donkeypong]

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway doesn't pay a dividend either. If he's any good, he says, the price of the stock will go up. So there you have it.

[maqifrnswa]

Dividends aren't paid out per say however.

very important people get this. I can just see a lot of angry people next month saying, "You promised dividends and the number of BTS I own isn't going up, WTF!"

I can give you a 10% raise, or I can make everything you buy 10% less expensive.

[Troglodactyl]

Wouldn't that cause the actual wallet balance to be confusing to the individual transacting as his % would change by a different amount then he transacted with.  Seems like it could be a source of confusion.

Last I heard was that balance was to be displayed as (yourRealBalance/totalRealSupply)*4,000,000,000.  I believe the number of zeros on the final multiplier is still flexible.  That part is purely cosmetic, but people do love large numbers.

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=3024.0

Since you'll enter transactions in the same units in which your balance is displayed, the numbers should all be intuitive.  So in this case with a real balance of 30, and a total supply of 4,000,000, your displayed balance would be (30/4,000,000)*4,000,000,000=30,000.  If you enter to send 5000 of that displayed balance, it would send a real balance of (5000*4,000,000)/4,000,000,000=5.  This would leave your real balance at 25, which would display as  (25/4,000,000)*4,000,000,000=25,000 as expected.  If you mean people being confused by the transaction fees, I don't think it will be any more confusing than Bitcoin transaction fee deductions.

[skillfulhacking]

Wouldn't that cause the actual wallet balance to be confusing to the individual transacting as his % would change by a different amount then he transacted with.  Seems like it could be a source of confusion.

[marauder]

The target is 0.5% per year but as you say it's variable depending on network demand. Dividends aren't paid out per say however. The number of coins you own is constant but whenever there is a transaction a small portion of it is destroyed as the transaction fee. The effect of these transaction fees is that your stake in the network increases as there are now less coins available so it's basically the same as a dividend, just without having to worry about sending a tiny fraction of a coin to each address in use which would rapidly become a large source of spam on the block chain, it's a lot cleaner this way.
As transaction fees are deducted in each block that coins are sent you effectly receive a dividend payment in each block.
I believe Bytemaster is going to have the wallet GUI display your balance as a % of the money supply rather then a number of bitshares, this way it is more apparent that your share is increasing with each block!

[speedy]

How good do we estimate the dividends will be? Say if I have 100 bts, how much new bts could I receive, and how often would that happen? Are dividends given out every N blocks?

Im guessing the only answer to the size is it depends on the rate at which transactions take place. But maybe someone else has a better answer.