Fees and intrinsic value

The fees paid for storing one’s transactions (or any other data) in the Byteball database are equal to the size of the data being stored.  If the size of your transaction data is 500 bytes, you pay exactly 500 bytes (the native currency of Byteball) in fees.  This means there is intrinsic value in bytes: it is the utility of permanently storing that size of data in a decentralized immutable database.  For data that represents financial transactions, the value is social rather than personal, because you absolutely need to store the full coin history in order to be able to prove the value and authenticity of the coin to each subsequent owner.

The fees are collected partially by those who are first to reference your transaction as parent and partially by witnesses.  The former incentivizes referencing the most recent transactions as parents, which results in the DAG growing in one direction only, like the trunk of a tree, and being as narrow as network latency permits.  If new transactions are rare enough, such that all nodes have enough time to sync before a new transaction appears, the DAG will look almost like a chain, with only occasional forks and quick merges.