Given all the recent discussions about Bitcoin's transactions fees. I thought I should take the time and quickly explain how the fee schedule work on BitShares.

Paying fees

One very interesting feature of BitShares is that users can basically pay their fees in any asset, not just using BTS. The only requirement is that the so called fee pool of the asset that you want to use to pay the fee is filled sufficiently. This is the job of the issuer. When you pay your fee in an asset other than BTS, then the fee is exchange implicitly with that fee pool at the so called core exchange rate. That rate as well as the funds in the fee pool are maintained by the issuer.

Example: You are sending bitUSD to Bob, but you don't own any BTS - why would you if you only want to deal with smartcoins? In this case, you can pay your fee in bitUSD. How much bitUSD you need to pay depends on the core exchange rate and the fee associated with a transfer (see below).

Different fees for different actions

Obviously, BitShares has many more features than just transfers like in Bitcoin. We call these features operations and there are over 30 of them. Each operation has it's own fee associated with it.
That said, you pay around $0.01 for a simple transfer while you pay over $100 for the creation of a worker.

Fee Management

Internally, all fees are denominated in BTS (even if you can pay them in another asset). This leads to a basic problem. Since BTS is a volatile asset, it could rise and fall significantly in value - and with it, the fees.
Furthermore, experiments need to take place in order to identify a good pricing model for each operation/feature.

For this reason, the inventors of BitShares allowed the fee schedule to be updated by the so called committee. The people in that committee are voted by the shareholders and can propose a fee change. After approval of a new fee schedule by at least 50%+1 of the committee members, the new fee schedule will be installed and automatically activated.

Current Fee Schedule

A year ago, I took the initiative, wrote down a fee schedule and proposed it to the committee. It was accepted and is installed ever since (the price in USD terms hasn't changed much since).
However, since BitShares is gaining traction again, I feel we should revisit the current fee schedule and update it accordingly.

The current fee schedule is denoted in USD to make easier sense of the numbers. Don't be surprised, but the configuration of the fee schedule is over 1,500 lines long. Mostly because there is a brief discussion for every single fee associated with the operations.

Current BitShares Fee Schedule Configuration

Any kind of input is highly appreciated.