I don't like the direction of where the 0.5 BTC fees are going. This is $12.50 in current BTC value, and there's no overhead to actually resetting PINs and unlocking withdraw addresses.
When is there going to be a order cancelling fee? Or an asset news post fee? 30BTC registration fee? Bold letters fee?
Banks and big sites like eBay does it because they're already king and aren't seriously competing with other sites that does it without a fee. Right now, BitFunder is consistently beating btct.co, and mpex makes all these exchanges look tiny. Stock exchanges have the Network Effect - the more users there are, the more assets there are, the more useful your exchange is. What would be a good idea now is building up more users, not disencouraging new people from joining.
Also, what security is locking withdraw address if you can just unlock it??
Good questions, and I really appreciate the input.
The issue is the amount of time that gets spent doing manual tasks. It's a lot. Way more than it should be. So there needs to be something in place that reimburses the company for time spent. (keeping in mind the company is not paying staff a salary yet) Avoiding the fees is easy. Don't forget your PIN, and don't lose your wallet. (Or don't lock the address.) If you think this is anal, check out MPEx policy on what happens if you ever make a deposit incorrectly.
BitFunder is beating btct.co in total volume. That's about the only metric I see a clear spread, and a large majority of that volume comes from one asset, a passthru, not a native asset. (S.Dice) We're also still by far the cheapest on a per-trade basis of all of the free-to-join exchanges. I think we've done pretty well doing what we set out to do, which was primarily to help recover from the GLBSE mess and I'd argue that we have a good crop of quality issuers. I'm very proud of how the issuers on BTC-TC have stepped up after GLBSE folded.
Locking the withdrawal address assures that if you're not using 2FA your account cannot be emptied except to your own address, UNLESS your email address is also compromised, AND that person is willing to make the support request, wait for us to fulfill it, etc. Not impossible, but I think if we can easily add little security features like that every here and there, then we might as well.
Hope that helps make sense of things!
Cheers.