Bitcoin Forum

I know that threads would have been created on a similar topic but I think it's time we found a feasible solution to this incessant problem.

Crypto Projects are known to enlist the services of Bounty huntersto make a booze on various platforms that will attract attention to their products, in exchange for their token or another notable cryptocurrency. Through this marketing campaign, new projects aim to get investors and supporters for their idea.

It's unfortunate however that many projects have reneged on their promises to reward users for their contributions. Once the project becomes relatively successful, they begin to give excuses, delay distribution, block hunters who request for payment or even fail to pay anyone.

The common excuse given is that hunters hurriedly dump token after listing thus affecting token price.

Does this justify the unfair treatment meted out to hunters who have worked assiduously for months trusting the team to fulfill their end of the bargain?

Cryptocurrency is supposed to be decentralized but bounty reward is not, what an antithesis?

I will like us to proffer the way forward on this. Bounty hunters have invested their time, mental and physical resources to promote such projects, so they are stakeholders and should have a say.

Your contributions are welcome.

I've been here for a while, and i've seen the rise (and hopefully the fall) of those bounty campaigns... I know a lot of people won't agree with what i'm about to say, but i'm going to say it anyways...

Let's start by saying I don't have a grudge against "bounty hunters", I know they're people that try to make some beer money, sometimes even considering their bounty hunter activity to be their main source of income. I've also never joined a bounty campaign, and i probably never will, so i don't have a grudge against one specific scam campaign

HOWEVER, if you break it down, a bounty hunter is a person that spams social media and other resources with promo material for a project that's usually pulled out of thin air (having 0 usability). Due to their "work", innocent people fall victim and buy tokens that are worth close to 0 once they can be traded on some dodgy exchange. The end result is: bitcointalk gets spammed with bounty reports and other spam posts that add nothing at all to our community, bitcointalk's resources get used for nothing, innocent people lose money, the crypto community gets a bad name in social media platforms due to the spamming and the scammy tactics of the token owners.

I'd like to see at least 99% of those tokens gone, i'd like to see most bounty hunters either leaving or switching to become actual crypto community members.

You've got a point in that bounty hunters may help suspiciously fraudulent projects "with 0 usability" get investors. However, not all projects promoted by hunters turned out to be scams or useless. I as a person started out as an investor, though I lost my first BTC to scammy cloud mining site Hash Ocean in 2017. It was after some mixed result of crypto investment that I added bounty to it. At least to cover for some losses in trading while advancing my knowledge of blockchain use cases.

If there's a way Bitcointalk can help vet projects that intend to announce their project (through ANN) and/or promote through promotions in the Bounty section, it will help a lot. This site is an authority in the industry. Probably if there could be a sort of commitment to a BTT smart contract fund, it would discourage useless projects and promote quality ones who know their onions.

This is unfair in my own opinion. There's every tendency for such projects to exit with investors funds in the future. An agreement should remain one, I think that's what smart contracts are meant to force.

Attitudes like this give crypto a bad name among non-enthusiasts.

Can't the bounty tokens be locked in a kind of escrow smart contract?

It's unfair yeah but no forces everyone to become a bounty hunter. You have no option but to follow the rules given to you. And just like the typical bounty hunting in some legit companies, they have certain measurements of how they'll pay their bounty hunters. But in this case, there's even no assurance that the bounty hunters will be paid. The locking of bounty rewards shouldn't be prolonged by the developers so that they can simply give the incentive that bounty hunters want.

We can only find the solution to this problem only when we stop promoting every projects which is paying in their own tokens.Yes you heard me right just stop promoting and if there is a demand gets created for bounty hunters then they will be treated with much more respect.

I think the best way to fix this problem is to implement escrow to all bounties to secure the payment for the bounty hunters. This method is fair for both parties all agreement must be met before executing payment

You get it. That was the point I raised above. Escrow the bounty tokens, and there would be less issues about nonpayment of tokens.

It seems your only concern is payments or bounty rewards.
There are two ways to solve that.
First is very obvious; If you find the project or startup too good to be true, then don't promote it. Chances are, by the end of the day, you won't be getting anything from them.
Second, join only in bounty campaigns with escrows. It can be a third party escrow service provider or the bounty manager himself. Having an escrow is an additional assurance that you'll get your hard-earned tokens when the campaign ends.

-Those are just bullshit excuse because the primary dumpers are the investors itself.

-They wont care at all yet you would really be treated up that way as long their business is important than all of those who advertise them would really be just ignored after that.

-Decentralization doesnt correlate with bounty reward.  :D

-As a bounty hunter then you would really make use of those resources and we know the chances on getting shit tokens thats why DYOR would be always be put up in mind.

I won't put the blame on the team if they denied bounty hunters their rewards, that is Bounty Manager's job, BM is the only law standing between bounty hunters and the team of that project, it's why I prefer joining bounties from a bounty manager with good rep, as a good BM he or she must do everything in his/her power to make sure bounty participants get their rewards

You have no idea what you are talking about. The manager is only a facilitator or a middle man involved in managing the campaign. If the team does not pay or wish to pay, the manager is having their hand tied to pay the hunters.

If you want to blame someone blame yourself for joining that campaign and the temptation for free money. :D

LOL this type of self-entitlement is what makes the bounty hunters arrogant and illogical.

Also know that many managers have paid out from their own pocket just because they were denied payment by the team as an act of goodwill because the manager also felt bad for the hunters. ::)

Dont even talk about anything related to legal, coin offering are anyway not legalized securities and so you are at your own risk on buying them or earning them in the case of bounty hunters.

But the problem also is that Bounty manager doesn't implement an escrow if only BM will be strict on accepting projects and have a condition to promote their project but need to be escrowed. The key to this implementation depends on bounty managers

I don't agree to the part where you stated that bounty is free money. Bounty is not airdrop so I don't see how it is free money. Don't forget that hunters also expend mental and material resources to promote the project. So bounty reward is payment for marketing work done.

escrow will not always work, since it's a new project you will never know if they really have a plan to list it in exchange  ,if they don't have plan to list  it what will be the job of escrow holding a trash tokens ?

The best things that I see that possible to happen is to paid hunters in weekly basis and the payment should be an Altcoins that can be tradeable in the exchange .

You dont have to agree or disagree. We are all entitled to our own opinions.

Airdrop is a way of collecting people's personal data for selling on the internet. Did you know that? Thats why I like to use the words like that. Bounties are not bad things but they have been made to look in the context of ICOs and so on has been bad. It was supposed to be a rewarding system for the people who promoted the project and from there is went to a spamming fest to make money by less income countries.

Thats correct and I hate to say that bounty hunters if having such skills are wasting them by writing articles and doing translations. Rather they should use it on bitcoin paying services and real life work. Because in the end bounty tokens are 99% going to be useless while bitcoin and fiat are not.

You are definitely right on this one!

Escrow wont really work because we cant still be sure if those tokens would get some value or not which means its pointless and not really a good thing to consider that the project is legit nor have potential if they do
escrow out those tokens just for its hunters to be paid up.The thing you do talk about paying up on weekly basis, then it sounds great but only a few or a very rare case to have that kind of project where they do consider
out on paying established coins or does have value yet most of the time, people would really receive shit tokens for their hardwork on advertising it.

Bounty hunters will not want to hear this but this is my constant advice as before. And I was considered a bounty hunter at one point, so you can assure yourself, I do not see myself as superior.

We all were here when the opportunities to "earn" almost free money seemed so good. 2016 and 2017 people got a lot of tokens that mooned and so they did almost nothing and got almost rich.

I was not one of them, but I joined some bounties very early on, since everyone was doing it, I was missing out.

But at the same time I quickly realized like bounty hunters did, that the free money did not last and will never come back. So I chose to stick with good projects that I also used and therefore also could proudly talk about and know well.

So: find something you like. Find something you use a lot of. Find something you believe in and know can last for years if not lifetime. Then you stick to them and build them. Their success = your success.

Bounty hunters will continue to be helpless sorry to say, scammers have taken over crypto space and they are building unrealistic projects to fool investors, with the help of bounty hunters they get things done easily and in the end they either don't pay at all or ruin their promises and split the reward, no law is holding them back, they have nothing to be scared of, project teams can do any how they feel like

Bounty management has been trying to do that and the payment was going very smooth as the tokens being escrowed to the trusted parties to decrease the possibility for the hunters not get any payment.
Escrow is the only way to fix this problem.

Maybe the bounty hunters will have another opportunity to find the real projects which can give them the money by promoting the project to the public. But, yes, many scam projects which trick the bounty hunters right now cannot make money, and their names become bad in public. I think the bounty hunters need to check the details of every project before they participate in the projects.

You do have a big point there mate, bounty hunters spams social media platforms with crappy projects and newbies get hyped and invest on the crappy project that leads to huge losses, I do blame bounty hunters for that, I do, but there are few other bounty projects that are way better, very promising and good development so far, it's just that anything online requires learning, investors either old or newbie must not jump into new projects because someone said they are good enough

I wont say to that extreme but yes you have to consider every new project to be a borderline scam and thus shove it away when presented in front of you. Some investors who get fooled are not worthy to be called investors anymore if they are still putting money in non-legal securities like ICO coins. They should know better how to take care of their money and these are only wannabes get-rich-quick people.

Better to focus your time on learning something skillful than wasting time on bounties. Bitcoin paying campaign are also going on, which is a good thing to join though.

Sadly it is true. Once you give them your money, it is gone. Whatever coin they sell to you, it is worthless anyway.

I support this too  . No matter what happen to our coins next , it's either they will be listed or not     , price pump or dump , that is already our problem anymore but we can now be satisfied as long we receive our payment from the bounties that we joined . I only see a bounty that has an escrow on payments for eth and other top coins but haven't see one if the payment is in form of tokens or other new altcoins . Hope they will start it now asap

It will be the same, your work can't be appreciated. You just wasting your time to post anything in this forum and your energy as well. If I were you I'll take my time to learn something useful like learn more about trading to improve my trading skill, at least if I spend money from my own pocket it will not be in vain. Because sooner or later I can make money in it and it can be made as my side income.

But another suggestion, if you still want to earn money on bounty you may need only choose a manager that has been trusted. There are a lot of managers which has been trusted in this forum as you can see here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4412712.0 most likely if you join bounty campaign with those managers you will get a reward as you expected.

I think it's true that at least the prize is to pay for everything that has been contributed by supporters such as bounty hunters, because maybe they also don't want to disappoint their project supporters, and then give the hunters the right reward.

In my opinion if there could be a way to lessen or remove all the scam bounty campaign so bounty hunter could promote legit and promising project, So investor and bounty hunter would not be fooled by the any scam project. I don't blame Bounty hunter spamming and advertising any project there are just a victim of scam bounty campaign  which they believe that the project they are promoting will be successful in the future.

Then what would it be? This is a free market and you cant stop those scam projects to exist when its owners/creators would really tend to call for an ICO for their scammy idea.

This would continue as long these ICO market do still exist yet there are still bounty hunters who do continually supporting on advertising them just for the hopes of making

profit if the said project would able to listed out on various exchanges.We cant really remove that kind of mindset from anyone.

Many people already thought about that, but how can we do that? how to remove all bounty (especially altcoin bounty) while there are always people joined on them? they don't think anything and just joined if they think they are legit which hasn't and can't be proven yet.

Your thread is understandable so many of us have been a victim of this and it will not likely stop because they looked down on bounty hunters as worth pennies, the least that we can do is to reports these projects so investors will have second thought of investing, if they can do this to bounty hunters what more to investors.

I have seen this on one campaign managed by Julerz it's good for the community, we must call out bounty managers to do the same, it's good for the bounty hunters, for bounty managers and reputation of the project, it can create good vibes and trustworthiness from investors.

I agree that all hunters should be paid, regardless if the project succeeds or not. Project committed to it, and they should see it through.

However, some things need to be said as well:
- many projects will not agree to escrow (many come from non-crypto space, and to them escrow like minerjones means nothing, they don't trust anyone with their tokens/coins). and if you as a BM reject them because of that, they'll find some other guy that'll do it anyway
- many projects fail, and as such their coins are worthless, so they refuse to send them as "they have to pay the tx fee"

On the other hand, as one member said at the beginning of this thread:
- most hunters outreach is 0 (like 99% of them have 0 or some fake views/interactions)
- many hunters use multiple accounts (some can be caught easily, some might never)
- less than 0.1% of investors are attracted by bounty hunters
- most social media bounty tasks done by hunters are automated (bots, services like IFTT, etc...)
- over 75% of the hunters hardly speak any english and/or don't understand the rules
- over 90% of the hunters don't even read what the projects is about, they just apply
- almost all of the bounty hunters don't follow up on the project, meaning they just do the task and in 6 months rage that there was a token swap or kyc that they weren't aware of

And when you factor in all of this, and the results of the bounty (which is sometimes tracked by a 3rd party) it's no wonder that project owners feel the reward is wasted and cut it by even 90% or remove it completely.

I've seen few really good "hunters", people that made awesome HQ videos and had real audience, and i always went one step further to see they get rewarded.
Sorry guys, video that's shot from a phone while you read the whitepaper out loud in some weird language doesn't really cut it as PREMIUM advertising

Weak projects will always put blames on bounty hunters for price dump on exchanges, nothing can change this fact but Its better to be more strict with new bounty campaigns, many are bad, make sure you pick better projects only or follow good bounty managers

Your words make zero sense, mind rephrasing? Bounty hunters are not guaranteed any payment as per the terms of any bounty project, more so after the onset of scam projects and teams shutting down ongoing bounties. Its not about being "helpless" but being idiotic about what they are doing, if the hunters dont realize that they are being fooled then nobody can help them to stop wasting their time.

Almost all the projects are failures from the start, I have stated this previously and I will say it again. All the ICO projects have mainstreams competitors and thus will not be able to gain an edge in the world market. The effect is that the token price reduces as people will sell but nobody buys.

You deserve merit(s) for that. Sadly I dont have any left.  :-\

It's ok. It needed to be said out loud. It's unpopular opinion I'm afraid but IMHO it's the truth.
The stories I can tell, and my experience, I could probably write some memoirs...

Memoirs of a Bounty Manager:
Chapter I : Reserve translation for Klingon
Chapter II: When distribution
Chapter III: Sir I working hard, why no stack
Chapter IV: When Binance
Chapter V: SCAM

I think start not to easily follow a project that only makes promises, because if you stay in that position, I'm sure you will think like that forever, in my opinion, start thinking about researching a project that you want to follow then looking for basic information and if it can be confirmed then start contributing to a project,

Yes, absolutely before joining any bounty campaign we have to make research about it and afterward looking forward to making a wise decision. Because most of the hunters are seems regardless poor while selecting good bounty by joining it without doing research on it. If we research good enough while joining the bounty then there would be a higher probability of getting a good project.

yeah sorry if what I said didn't make sense maybe because I was still inexperienced, and maybe I just compared it with airdrop,
It is also true that until now I have not encountered anything like the collection of fees for a project, and now I am more familiar with what you are explaining,
but sometimes a lot of new people don't pay attention to this and just complete the task given by the project and also maybe I am that person, but for now I start to understand and be careful when I act.