Bitcoin Forum

Does anyone know of an exchange that lets me issue an asset with no fee? Or a fee on the order of $20 instead of >1BTC? I realize many of these fees were set when BTC were not this absurdly expensive, and having a fairly substantial fee discourages scammers (or at least scammers who aren't confident in their scams) but seriously, I'm not paying $400 to an exchange so that they can make charts and run shareholder polls, which cost them roughly nil.

Asset issuer fees of exchanges that I know about:
CryptoStocks: 2BTC
BitFunder: 5BTC
MPEx: 30BTC just to sign up. I didn't look further than that.
PicoStocks: 50BTC
Havelock: I don't think they let you issue anything without a lot of discussions with them first.
EDIT: I forgot BTC-TC: 5BTC

Are there other asset exchanges I haven't found? Do any of them have low/no fees for asset issuers? Transaction fees are just fine. Do we have distributed asset exchanges/colored coins yet? Is Open Transactions where I want to be looking?

Should I just open up a forum post that says "Hey guys, give me all your BTC for my project and I'll just remember who you are"?

I can't think of any; but if there were any exchanges that offered what you're asking, chances are they would be out of the business pretty quick.


The fees protect both the exchange, and to a very small extent, the investors.

You are paying to an exchange for their exposure, not really for their charts. It doesn't cost eBay 20% or whatever to sell an item, but you are paying 20% for the promotion of being listed on eBay.

That exchange would probably attract scammers, but I fail to see how that would cause it to go out of business. People would just have to do a more careful evaluation of whatever they wanted to invest in. Hosting a scam asset doesn't cost an exchange anything. There's bad publicity from people who somehow expected the exchange to prevent scams from happening, but you know what they say about bad publicity.

Yes.

If you think that because "making charts," "running polls," securing large sums of coins from investors and running an order matching engine are things that cost "roughly nil" in time and money, they shouldn't cost so much, then write your own and undercut everyone.  It's a free market. 

What do you figure is the point of having an "asset" for the creation of which you paid $20? What is this, the movie-and-a-burger asset?

It's an honest question, even if it may not seem that way to you. Think: you want people to bother reading your reports, you want to write these reports, you want all the complex infrastructure of shareholders etc for what exactly? A ticket to a shitty game?

You could always use Excel.   ;)

Anything you do is going to take time and effort to operate.  Maybe not so hard on the surface, but think a bit about the costs behind running a reliable platform.  Hosting costs.  Backup costs.  Time to build it.  Time to set it up.  Time to maintain it.  Time to rebuild it when it gets hacked.  Coins lost in the hack.

5 BTC is cheap.