A suggestion for ICO promoters and bounty managers

[bryant.coleman]

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.

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[kokrokok]

very good idea and in my opinion it makes sense but what I ask here is that it can all work or be approved by the moderator? and I don't think anyone will be able to pay $ 50,000 in making an ANN or bounty thread to escrow because that is too large

[dentolas]

These are real problems that are damaging this forum and the ICOs...but they are not only present here, 90% of the ICOs are scams...
In general I agree with your points and with your purposed solutions, just think that on point 1 of the solutions, 50.000 would be difficult to advance for someone that is raising money... and this would be based on the trust from the promoters on the Bitcointalk staff...
all the rest seems fair and easily implemented and in my oppinion the inclusion of these rules/steps on the bounty/ann sections would help a lot to preserve the image and reputation of this forum and help the crypto world to preserve this ICO/bounty system that helps both ICOs as well as bounty hunters
cheers

[Yshakov.v]

I think that now is not the best time for cryptocurrency. Now this forum has turned into a forum for earnings.

[bryant.coleman]

very good idea and in my opinion it makes sense but what I ask here is that it can all work or be approved by the moderator? and I don't think anyone will be able to pay $ 50,000 in making an ANN or bounty thread to escrow because that is too large

$50K was just an example. The amount should be 0.1% of the soft-cap. If the softcap is $500,000, then the escrow amount should be 0.1% of that amount and that comes to $500.

[cabron]

I was surprise about the evolution of the bounty campaigns too, particularly the reporting of the social media tweets and reposts which are posted in the thread. We can't discuss anything on the thread anymore because of those reports. I have seen several projects that didn't pay the bounty participants, too bad those who joined are promoting it for them only to find out they are scam.

[bryant.coleman]

I was surprise about the evolution of the bounty campaigns too, particularly the reporting of the social media tweets and reposts which are posted in the thread. We can't discuss anything on the thread anymore because of those reports. I have seen several projects that didn't pay the bounty participants, too bad those who joined are promoting it for them only to find out they are scam.

It is quite irritating to see all the social media bounty reporting in the thread, when they can easily create a spreadsheet-based system for the same. Imagine if 10,000 participants are participating in the social media bounty (FB, Twitter.etc). There will be 10K posts in 7 days.

[Noobaru]

I have been a member of the forum for 9 months now and I totally get from where you are coming from since I engage in some of the bounties and consider myself an intermediate level regarding experience for bounty hunting. I would like to give my 2 cents here and possibly some suggestions as well.

1. Scam projects are indeed a problem here. However, an experienced bounty hunter should know how to check for red flags and avoid them, but that also takes time, which is crucial here. Those truly affected are newcomers (newbies) that don't have experience yet and get involved in scam projects quickly.

2. Exactly, I have noticed that as well. It irritates me when I see that spreadsheet hasn't been updated for weeks, but I guess at the end, everything is accounted for. At least in my case so far. In the case of cheating bounty managers, I have only spotted one so far with multiple accounts, but the campaign turned out to be scam at the end, so I don't know what he got out from that.

3. There are a lot of hunters with "maxed out" twitter and Facebook accounts, that I think are bought, because they are newbies and it takes one a lot of time to reach 10.000 followers on twitter. These two things don't go together. Exactly what would be a solution to this is hard to speculate. Another problem is also a number of participants which is rising rapidly in social media bounties, which has for result meager rewards at the end. Bounty could be limited to lets say 500 participants for twitter on "first come, first serve" basis like it is on platform called BountyHive.

4. I guess it is really hard to speculate on who actually drives the prices down since this involves many factors, but those with multiple accounts definitely help to crash the token.

5. I would love to hold on some of the tokens with possible future, but it is really hard as you say, because in the end, we are losing (especially in this bear market). This goes together with the previous point in which a solution to farming with multiple accounts should be found.


1. That's a great idea since this would eliminate scam projects completely and also lower totally unrealistic and incredibly high hard caps to the point where this 0.1% wouldn't be a problem to pay. Soft cap of 1 million and hard cap of 5 million dollars with 5000$ fee to pay for posting the thread. That is relatively not a lot of money to pay for "advertising" the project. A team of 10 should be able to afford that.

2. I guess there should be a rank requirement to run a campaign and an established list of bounty managers. But there is a problem, because a bounty manager can't run for example 100 projects simultaneously. I think we would quickly run out of managers and since of the new merit system, ranking up for the rank required to become one would be hard to achieve.

3. Hm, good suggestion. Managers could cross reference ETH address on the profile with the one on the spreadsheet and easily remove spammers from the campaign. Bounty hunters would then be limited to use one ETH at a time of course.

4. Bounty payments in ETH/BTC would be welcome, but really hard to realize since nobody would really want to do that. There is a reason they use the token system so they do not have to pay in "cash" in the form of established cryptos. There is one solution where rewards are paid in both ETH/BTC and tokens, but with a ratio of 1:5 perhaps. I've participated in a campaign like that before and it was great. But the ICO was already conducted and token was trading, so it was not hard for the project to do so.

5. Yes, KYC. One of the most discussed things around here. In my opinion, there is no perfect solution to that. On one hand, implementing KYC removes scammers completely and gives bigger rewards to honest hunters only. But on the other hand, gathering personal information is a big issue. Especially if the project is shady and could sell that info anytime on the black market (happened before). It is also not what cryptocurrency stands for, it should be anonymous, at least to some extent. Doing KYC for 100$ reward doesn't sound like a good idea for me, especially because hunters are not investors, so you don't need to check on the AML laws here. I can think about two solutions. First is to find a system, which is robust enough to remove scammers without gathering too much personal info. The second is mandatory KYC for ALL campaigns with ONE most trusted provider. You do it once and apply it to a new campaign. Much like how the system on bounty0x platform works.


I will save this thread and check for updates, it's really an interesting one and we can discuss a little more.

[yescrypto]

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.

What a great suggestions you have, I'm 100% in support of all the suggestions most especially suggestion number 5, I think that will help reduce the level of scam ico because all I studied about themthem is that both the organizers, promoters which are more of the bounty managers are in hand to hand way of scamming us. Wondering do some bounties for months and found out no reward is issued and happens to be scam.  Thanks for this.

[bryant.coleman]

5. Yes, KYC. One of the most discussed things around here. In my opinion, there is no perfect solution to that. On one hand, implementing KYC removes scammers completely and gives bigger rewards to honest hunters only. But on the other hand, gathering personal information is a big issue. Especially if the project is shady and could sell that info anytime on the black market (happened before). It is also not what cryptocurrency stands for, it should be anonymous, at least to some extent. Doing KYC for 100$ reward doesn't sound like a good idea for me, especially because hunters are not investors, so you don't need to check on the AML laws here. I can think about two solutions. First is to find a system, which is robust enough to remove scammers without gathering too much personal info. The second is mandatory KYC for ALL campaigns with ONE most trusted provider. You do it once and apply it to a new campaign. Much like how the system on bounty0x platform works.

Well, I was not saying that KYC should be made mandatory for the bounty hunters. On the other hand, I was saying that it should be mandatory for the ICO promoters. In that case, if they run away with the coins, then they could be prosecuted.

[coin8coin8]

I checked many old bounty threads(usually a bounty from 2006 to 2017). Although there were some scams, not much.
Look at the current bounty threads, almost half of them are scams or about equal to scams.
Think about it, why is this? How to stop scam bounties?
For most of your advice, I very much agree，but I have some different views.

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.

Hosting means responsibility and obligation, and it is difficult for custodians to guarantee that they are reliable.
And I don't think BTT will allow their staffs to engage in such business activities, this is one thing that goes against the rules of the forum.

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.

The trustworthy bounty manager is of course good. The question is who will evaluate which bounty manager is trustworthy? What criteria are used to evaluate?

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).

The weight of tokens held by bounty hunters is actually very low. Their dumping can't really affect the price at all. The more reason is that ICO promoters dump their tokens.

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.

Who will check their KYC? Scamer check yourself?

Your suggestions are very good, but in practice I think it is very difficult. In my opinion, the government's supervision of ICO and implementation of the ICO licensing system may be the best way.

[qazgroup]

Well if an ico project is worried about dumping of tokens by bounty hunters then there is an easy solution to that, the team should not pay bounty hunters with its tokens rather an equivalent value of eth or btc can be sent, this will make bounty hunters happy and also the risk of dumping will vanish.

[Prolifik]

I think that it is well known. Everyone knows about the problem, but the problem cant be solved because everything is about money. Bounty managers receive a lot of money to manage and promote scam ICO and they do not care about people.

[lobo13hf]

5. Yes, KYC. One of the most discussed things around here. In my opinion, there is no perfect solution to that. On one hand, implementing KYC removes scammers completely and gives bigger rewards to honest hunters only. But on the other hand, gathering personal information is a big issue. Especially if the project is shady and could sell that info anytime on the black market (happened before). It is also not what cryptocurrency stands for, it should be anonymous, at least to some extent. Doing KYC for 100$ reward doesn't sound like a good idea for me, especially because hunters are not investors, so you don't need to check on the AML laws here. I can think about two solutions. First is to find a system, which is robust enough to remove scammers without gathering too much personal info. The second is mandatory KYC for ALL campaigns with ONE most trusted provider. You do it once and apply it to a new campaign. Much like how the system on bounty0x platform works.

Well, I was not saying that KYC should be made mandatory for the bounty hunters. On the other hand, I was saying that it should be mandatory for the ICO promoters. In that case, if they run away with the coins, then they could be prosecuted.

I'm a little bit confused about that. What do you mean about ico promoters in this case? The manager or the ico creator.
I thought that KYC should be made mandatory for ICO creator and bounty manager. But there was another problem how can we identify if that was a real identity or not? AFAIK there was a lot of scammers are stealing the identity from the internet.

[TBboys]

5. Yes, KYC. One of the most discussed things around here. In my opinion, there is no perfect solution to that. On one hand, implementing KYC removes scammers completely and gives bigger rewards to honest hunters only. But on the other hand, gathering personal information is a big issue. Especially if the project is shady and could sell that info anytime on the black market (happened before). It is also not what cryptocurrency stands for, it should be anonymous, at least to some extent. Doing KYC for 100$ reward doesn't sound like a good idea for me, especially because hunters are not investors, so you don't need to check on the AML laws here. I can think about two solutions. First is to find a system, which is robust enough to remove scammers without gathering too much personal info. The second is mandatory KYC for ALL campaigns with ONE most trusted provider. You do it once and apply it to a new campaign. Much like how the system on bounty0x platform works.

Well, I was not saying that KYC should be made mandatory for the bounty hunters. On the other hand, I was saying that it should be mandatory for the ICO promoters. In that case, if they run away with the coins, then they could be prosecuted.

This is probably not going to happen because the laws of each country have different regulations. For some countries, such as China and South Korea, they have legal banned ICO, but many ICO promoters in their country can pass some other ways to avoid domestic laws, such as registering a company abroad. But most of their ICO investors are from their own country, so once their domestic investors are cheated, it is difficult to sue ICO promoters.
If sued in the name of the government, it is contrary to the law, because it is usually only the infringer who initiates the lawsuit. Therefore, in most cases, such litigation is very difficult. Unless there is a common international standard to implement, the judicial system of each country will have different understandings.
And in my opinion, KYC's information is not necessarily true. Once they are ready to implement a scam, they must have prepared everything, so KYC can't really stop scammers.

[hunnykaushal]

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.
I agree with this.

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.
Correct

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.
Totally agree

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.
I don't think anyone will make deposit before they raise money for project if this happen then there will be new website similar to bitcointalk which will provide this service in free as bitcointalk is doing now.

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.
If no one can be bounty manager out of list then we will have limited number of bounty managers and there will be no chance to those who want to be bounty manager in future.

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.
This is good idea.

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.

[yanto@1977]

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.

Your post is very good but I'm afraid ICO promoters and bounty managers has their own decisions. How they deal situation already prepare but they also have target to reach and limit to stop or change their rules. In this one we can't do nothing they have control to do what the best for their work. Just finish the task and get pay, that's all I want.

[batang_bitcoin]

Good suggestions.

I'll go through with those.

1. I think that was already suggested and was even considered by admin but I can't remember on what's the current status for that.

2. There are some newbies that are just hired by the ICO team somewhere that will be paid cheaper and isn't really recommended to follow any of their campaigns but in the past there's a newbie I've seen that run a campaign and everyone paid off. Actually there are many overviews for those recommended managers like this: Overview of Bounty Managers

3. This is the job of the manager and he can just add it to his bounty rule.

4. Its the best if they are just going to pay with btc or eth to avoid dumping with those tokens. But they are wise, paying their participants having no budget but just a portion of their token.

5. Can't say about this but I think many will disagree on that.

[Bttzed03]

Great inputs by OP

Inserting my thoughts:

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.
- This is what's driving real bounty hunters and investors from joining campaigns.

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.
- Yes, I noticed this one too. This is not to discourage aspiring new bounty managers but if you plan to be one, atleast gain some few merits.

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.
- The popularity of bounty campaign have gone up so this is expected. When I started in this forum, I was also one of those others call as "shitposter" or "spammer". These newbies could become better in time.

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.
- I could not agree more

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.
- Boom! Finally, someone else said it!

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.
- I really like this concept. I have read before about this ICO 2.0 where funds are put on an escrow and can only be released upon community votes. If the community is satisfied with the development and wishes the project to proceed, they can vote to release additional fund for further development.

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.
- The idea is good but what if they assign someone from their own team to manage the campaign instead of hiring a new one? Another question, who would make this pool of bounty managers?

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.
- Not sure about this. I believe a simple proof of authentication can do the trick

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).
- I think no promoter would ever accept a deal of 12 mos. token lock up. Payment is BTC, ETH, or Fiat is what these ICO promoters prefer.

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 thinks this is being implemented already.


IF I MAY ADD:
6. All bounty participants should be atleast Jr. Member or Copper Member regardless of the type of campaign they wish to join. This should atleast minimize the number of spams and shitposts.

[erox]

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.

You understand that it is several thousand dollars, you think there will be people ready to sacrifice the money for the sake of someone else's project? This madness. Bounty managers only care about profits, they will not sacrifice their money for someone else's ICO.