Being a member of Bitcointalk for more than 6 years, I am quite a bit bothered by what happening in the bounty section for the past few months. This is what I have noticed:

1. A lot of scam projects are creating bounty campaigns and ANN threads. Once the bounty campaign is finished, they vanish all of a sudden without paying the bounty hunters and leaving the investors in limbo.

2. The quality of the bounty managers have gone down. Junior level members are acting as bounty managers and they often don't update the spreadsheets and sometimes indulge in cheating by enrolling proxy accounts to the campaign.

3. Large number of newbs are signing up for bounty campaigns, often enrolling using purchased Facebook / Twitter accounts (esp. in Social media bounty). The quality of posts being done by the bounty campaign participants have gone down quite a lot during the last few months.

4. Even those bounties which pay end up listing at 80% or 90% discount to their original prices and in the end the honest bounty campaign participants end up with very small rewards. On the other hand, those signing up with 10-12 multiple accounts end up with sizeable rewards. And it is the latter category, which indulges in token dumping.

5. There is no incentive to hold on to the tokens, as a majority of the ICO promoters dump their tokens in the market and vanish. If you check, the vast majority of the listed ICOs are in a dormant or defunct state now.

I have a few suggestions to resolve some of the issues, before the issues go out of hand.

1. There should be a requirement that if anyone want to post an ANN in Bitcointalk, he must deposit 0.1% of the total amount (of the softcap) in an escrow account. For example, if a project is planning to raise $50,000,000 from the investors, then before creating the ANN thread the promoters must deposit $50,000 in either BTC or ETH to an escrow account held by the Bitcointalk staff. If the soft-cap is smaller, like $500,000 then the escrow amount should be 0.1% of that, i.e $500. If the promoters vanish, then this amount should be forfeited. Also, if the promoters go back on their promises once the tokens are listed, then this escrow amount should be frozen and may be (partially) released only if they achieve the objectives which they had promised earlier.

2. There should be a list of approved bounty managers and those outside this list should not be allowed to act in this role. There are a lot of trusted bounty managers here, like Yahoo62278 and Lutpin. I don't think that newbs should be given priority over them.

3. In order to participate in a bounty campaign, it should be mandatory for all the users to post their ETH address in the "Location" field in the profile. I have noticed a large number of spammers using someone else's BTT account and their own ETH address to enroll in to social media bounties. This step will put and end to the practise and will weed out the spammers.

4. All the bounty campaign participants must be carefully screened before the payout. In order to prevent token dumping, a few steps can be taken. Since the bounty reward is 1% to 3% of the total amount, the promoters themselves can purchase this portion from the exchanges. Or they can make the bounty payments in BTC/ETH. There should also be a condition that the promoters should hold on to 90% of their tokens for at least 12 months. (Because I have noticed that it is the promoters who do dumping in the vast majority of the cases, and they blame it on the bounty hunters).

5. KYC must be mandatory for ICO promoters and bounty campaign managers (unless they are on level 2 DT). If this is done, then the scammers won't be able to set up multiple fake ICOs.

I am posting this because now the real impact is becoming obvious. Experienced users are staying away from bounty campaigns and even very promising ICOs are getting listed at heavily-discounted rates. This can't go on forever.

Good ICOs need to be protected from the negativity in the market created by the fake ICOs.
Honest bounty hunters needs to be protected from the cheaters
Properly run bounty campaigns and airdrops should be appreciated and differentiated from the poorly managed ones.

There are lots of coins this days and more are still emerging by the day. If eventually cryptocurrency becomes accepted globally and it's been adopted for usage, do you think all the coins would be accepted for usage or only a  selected few?

What do you think will ETH fall to double digits? And if it falls would you buy some?

Thinking yet? Let me help you.

You should start playing blockchain games, because:

1. In contrast to usual video games you owe products you bought for your game. And blockchain controls all the operations;
2. You don’t need to invest money to start earning;
3. You earn crypto;
4. It’s only in your hands. Nobody can influences your chances to win. It’s just you and your gaming skills: the better you play the more you earn (up to $3k);
5. There is trading too;
6. You have more possibilities to earn;
7. Competition is low. You can make a good profit just being professional;
8. DApps users number will be growing comparing to traders.


UPD

I've noticed a lot of people here want to know how to find blockchain games. That is why I've created product hunt collection with new blockchain games. Hope it will be useful for you  

https://www.producthunt.com/@house_lama/collections/blockchain-games

UPD #2 there is a good blockchain shooter War Field. it’s 100% not scam so I can send it here. you can read details about this game here (I don’t send direct link to their website not to make them advertisement) https://gameunculus.io/blog/96

Hello, I was following Bitcoinus platform since the ICO has started. Few days ago they have listed their token on HitBTC. I wonder why the price of BITS is so low now if they have working product? Despite their platform is fully developed, the token price stays the same or lower..

Ethereum 2.0 is coming soon, and it could increase by a thousand fold the Ethereum network’s capacity to process transactions.
Vitalik Buterin, the cofounder of Ethereum who represents the world’s second-largest blockchain, has shared in Prague this week, the new upgrade formerly known as Ethereum 2.0, called  Serenity, and has  promised to make the network faster, more secure, less energy-intensive, and capable of handling thousands of transactions per second.
At the annual Ethereum developer conference in Devcon, Buterin reported the twisting path that efforts to upgrade the network have taken. Buterin and his coworkers were forced to recalibrate their timeline for development, as they got delayed with distractions like the infamous DAO hack, which led to a network split that Buterin compared in his talk to the Hindenburg disaster. They also found themselves pursuing overly complicated dead ends such as “super-quadratic sharding.”
According to Buterin Serenity will see Ethereum finally switch from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, a model in which people and organizations holding ether will “stake” their own coins in order to maintain the network, and will earn block rewards for doing so. In 2018, Ethereum’s core developers decided to abandon the half-measures of the hybrid model they had been working on and instead set out on a path that would initially take longer, but would deliver “a proof-of-stake and sharded blockchain with the properties that we’re looking for,” said Buterin.
Serenity won’t be the final product of Ethereum developers. Issues of transaction fees and governance will remain, said Buterin. Along with other technical improvements, he and other core developers have already begun mapping out future tweaks to the proof-of-stake model.

As the market is in pain with all coins declining dramatically in prices, for instance bitcoin dropping to as low as $3,700. And at this point of time, I still believe in cryptocurrency which will remain forever with us making a big change in our lives. So I am planning to be more active in bounty campaigns and trading. What about you guys?  

Cryptocurrency is the most popular terms nowadays. People like cryptocurrency so much. Many people are involving in the crypto world. Everyone wants to earn money from cryptocurrency. While people are liking cryptocurrency, Government does not like it at all. In some countries, the government banned the cryptocurrency. What is the reason behind this banned?

Nowadays there are so many exchanges in circulation, if we look at some of reviews, there are already thousands of exchanges, I want to ask you all, what are the best 3 new exchanges in 2018?