BSIP80: Short-Term Membership

[abitmore]

We had annual membership feature but it's removed long ago due to flaws in designation and implementation. Discussion in #186 indicates that a new short-term membership feature is good for the platform.

[MichelSantos]

What are the desirable characteristics for short-term member (SLTM) (STM)?

Features

• A membership fees
• A membership duration that is fixed or defined by committee parameter
  • If it is a committee parameter, will that change be expected to alter the duration for current STLM accounts?
• Will this membership fee be split between the registrar, referrer, and the network to cover the cost of the additional RAM?
• During the short-term membership:
  • what is the reduction of fees for the STM account?
  • how much of the downstream referral income goes to the STM account?
  • how much of the downstream referral income goes to the STM account's referrer and registrar?
• If an STM upgrades to a LTM
  • is there any discount?
  • is there any special distribution of that upgrade fee?

Software Specifications

• The referral vesting object is purged after expiry

[abitmore]

How about STM?

[abitmore]

If it is a committee parameter, will that change be expected to alter the duration for current STLM accounts?

Good question. My preferred answer is no.

Will this membership fee be split between the registrar, referrer, and the network to cover the cost of the additional RAM?

Yes, same as other operation fees.

During the short-term membership:

• what is the reduction of fees for the SLTM account?
• how much of the downstream referral income goes to the SLTM account?
• how much of the downstream referral income goes to the SLTM account's referrer and registrar?

Good questions. I think we can design them as parameters for the committee, registrars and even referrers to make the final decisions.

If an SLTM upgrades to a LTM

• is there any discount?

This is an interesting idea. We can dive deeper for the details.

• is there any special distribution of that upgrade fee?

Same as other operation fees.

[abitmore]

An idea is to have something like "new user coupons" to attract new referrers (e.g. webmasters) to try the referral program. For example, a discount or immediate refund when buying a STM for the first time(s).

[MichelSantos]

An idea is to have something like "new user coupons" to attract new referrers (e.g. webmasters) to try the referral program. For example, a discount or immediate refund when buying a STM for the first time(s).

This idea could be combined with the sharing of the downstream referral income.

1. A new committee-defined parameter (0% to 100%), let's call it f, will define how much of the referral fee is kept by the STM account. The remaining fraction (1 - f) is split among the registrar and referrer of the STM account. Later when some referral amount (A) is calculated to flow to the STM account, the STM account will keep A × f. The remainder, A × (1 - f), will be split between the STM's registrar and referrer based on the account's distribution of fees.

2. The above structure might then incentivize account registrars or account referrers to also provide an "STM upgrade faucet". These accounts can offer to pay for the STM upgrade of accounts they register or refer. These accounts could be brand new accounts, or accounts that they previously created.

This way an account can be upgraded to STM by registrars or referrers sponsoring the upgrade, and the sponsors can potentially benefit from paying for the upgrade.

[sschiessl-bcp]

Any solution in here would require a hard fork. Thought play for you @abitmore, what you think:

a) would the committee be interested in having those "new user coupons" available through the reference faucet? BitShares EU already has a similar program that can be used for that. User would sign-up with BitShares EU, get a referral code (looking like a guid) that is connected to his non-LTM account, and BitShares EU distributes the referral rewards when the referrer requests it (for a fee of course). This is a centralized solution, but it would be able to have this available asap, and I don't think that referrers care too much about if it is a centralized solution

b) would the committee be interested in paying for the reference faucet when worker funds are depleted?

[abitmore]

Thanks for the new ideas. I'd like to invite @thul3 to the discussion.

[MichelSantos]

Variant A is intended to further discussion on this issue by describing one possible STM

A couple of considerations that may significantly affect an STM definition are:

(a) to be fair to previous registrars and referrers, any new STM category should probably only affect fee distribution for new accounts referred after a hardfork

(b) if the Committee will not change the network % and the lifetime referrer % and if the maximum percentage for an STM account should be higher than 50%, it will be necessary to define special logic while distributing fees from STM-referred accounts

[pmconrad]

For reference: cryptonomex/graphene#539