Basically they are replacing btc as a median and using blocknet shares in its place. Thats what it looks like to me when its all boiled down. Rather than pay tx's fees to miners using btc and an exchange fee. You use blocknet shares and the fee is split up among the holders of the shares.
You would still have to pay transaction fees to miners of each coin. I still don't see the need for a microfee on top of the fee for using the "services". This shareholder "micro-fee" fee seems to exist only so shares can exist so there can be an IPO. Again, what's to prevent a fork of Blocknet without microfees?
Aha, I see where all this hypothesising has been going: some of you hope to show insufficient warrant for Blocknet fees and thereby undermine the rationale for Blocknet tokens and an ITO.
However:
- The Blocknet is the infrastructure that allows a coin to render a service. The Blocknet microfee expresses the value that the Blocknet adds.
- Fees are not just for currency conversion. They're for every time a node provides any service (and there's an indefinite number of potential types of service).
- Blocknet fees are not used to secure the network (and there won't be any mining).
- In a way, Blocknet fees are mildly analogous to tx fees in a proof-of-stake currency, where they don't go to miners, but simply deflate the money supply, thereby expressing the value of usage of a currency to the currency. Fees in the Blocknet express the value of the currency to holders.
Outside of currency design, fees are there for a really simple reason: we need funding to develop a whole lot of next-gen technology. So we're having an ITO and incentivising people to buy and hold shares.