A suggestion for ICO promoters and bounty managers

[mcnocon2]

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 totally agree on this one, if this can be implemented here on the forum this will lessen the scam and fake ICOs. We need to set rules to gain trust and bring back the legit ICOs only for the community on this 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.

However, I strongly disagree on this one. Everyone should be given the chance to become bounty manager even though he/she has no experience on it.

[Moxivuki]

OP's suggestion is very good. Unfortunately, most of the bounty managers don't care. The only thing they care about is their own interests.
Bounty hunters need to be more united to boycott/Accusation those scam projects, and DT members should be more active, and members of the fake ICO/bounty should immediately been negative trusted.

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.

But there are some projects choose to host the bounty thread by themselves， We can't force them to choose a bounty manager.
For this situation, I think I need a rule： “If you don't choose a bounty manager, then you can't post bounty thread.”  Although this is unlikely to be achieved.

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 totally agree with this, although KYC can't completely eliminate the scam project, but at least limit the fake ico teams.

[Iwillgotothemoon]

For the quality of most bounty managers, especially those newbie mangers, it’s always unreliable, because they may leave at any time and won’t say anything to you, when you found that the spreadsheet hasn’t been updated for a long time, everything It’s too late.
It’s a very frustrating thing to waste a few months to follow a bounty and finally get nothing. In order to avoid this kind of thing, it is time to formulate corresponding rules for the bounty thread, I fully agree with the OP's suggestion.
I think hosting a deposit is a very good way, because it will increase the cost of scam. Once it is confirmed to be scam, the deposit will not be refunded and the bounty participants will be compensated.When the cost of scam increases, the bounty thread will not flood, and every bounty manager must carefully choose the ICO and need to consider the interests of the bounty participants. This will greatly reduce the appearance of scams.

[myohmy81]

This is a good suggestion in order to eliminate those scam projects that were created from empty ideas and asking for money without genuine intention.
But 0.1% of their softcap is kinda big amount for starter project who have genuine intention. So I guess it's better that it will be lowered or before the Ann Thread will be published, there will be mods to verify the project first before making it live.

Though it really need some effort but it will surely make this forum clean from scam projects.

[Kevin77]

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

They are really some crazy problems I must say but at the same time, there is just a limit to what the moderators will be able to do in this case.

First, we need to understand this is a community and it is a decentralized community with everyone having the license to easily post whatever they like and as much as I feel what the OP have said, there are some things that we have to understand is not going to be plausible and would possibly just drive out investors traffic from this platform. Some good points were raised, such as KYC, screening of bounty participants, but the rest I really do not see how it can work.

For instance, if i have a project, i can decide to recruit anyone I like who can do the job without having to look for the likes Yahoo, Lutpin and co before getting that done.

What we should not forget is that we all have a part to play when it comes to doing proper digging on the project we want to advertise for and really that is the best way to go about this whole issue of being involved in a scam project or not.

[Noobaru]

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.

Oh yes, sorry, I misunderstood since I thought you meant ICO promoters were hunters. It was late yesterday here, haha. I agree with mandatory KYC for ICO promoters, because that would definitely eliminate a lot of fake projects here. And with mandatory fund deposit for opening a thread it could bring them close to zero. But it would be hard to implement both requirements. If you could choose only one, which one would you prefer? Obligatory fund deposit or KYC?

As far as prosecution goes... this is still a tough one, because crypto is still so unregulated. Many scammers have been identified, but got away with it, because of loose laws. I've red about an exit scam project, where the CEO was prosecuted, but the charges were dropped, mainly because of missing laws. Probably he also had a good lawyer. Can't remember where I've red that though. Oh and, thanks for the merit!

[Nolimitz84]

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.

It’s not necessary for the manager to do it. The team that is going to conduct ICO should do it. And the amount of 0.1% is pretty fair. Thank you to the author for such a proposal. But we must do away with the fraudsters.It is a cancerous tumor that primarily repels anyone investor to invest his money. While there is no activity in the subject, but I think the BTT moderators should somehow respond to this proposal.

[GmBoom]

That is a very good idea to filter out some of the users that are just aiming to scam good users especially to the newbies. It is a good way and hopefully it can be implemented soon to this forum to ensure that there can be no more cases of scam ico or even bounty. Thanks to that concept sir @bryant.coleman

[mastersay]

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.

I completely agree to this part. Especially when it can be implemented that the forum have official legit bounty manager. On that way we can filter out a scam manager from a good one. Thank you for bringing this concept.

[bryant.coleman]

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.

I guess you didn't read the thread properly. I am not saying that the bounty manager should make the deposit and escrow it. I was saying that the ICO promoters should do that. If they are planning to raise $50 million, then they should at least be having 50K in their hand, right?

[Alluro]

This is the most common problem in the bounty and ICO section. The main reasons are too many scam projects and hunters cheating with fake, multiple accounts. Purchased accounts with the fake audience not getting a successful marketing campaign to ICO projects. I would like to add more suggestions to your thread.

1. Add more rank, merit requirements for participate in bounty campaigns to avoid newbies and multiple accounts.
2. Add rank, merit requirements to be a bounty manager.
3. Remove the social media posting and reposting campaigns. (Purchased accounts with the fake audience not getting a successful marketing campaign, they work as spam bots)
3. Accept high-quality articles, videos, infographics. (The blogs, channels have to be with a high-quality audience, premium blogs like cointelegraph)
4. Make payments weekly, monthly period via bitcoin or ethereum. (This method saves bounty distribution dump, bounty hunters can get guaranteed payments, bounty hunters knows they are not wasting their time and scam projects not going to waste bitcoin or ethereum as payments, that means we can easily catch scam projects)
5. Make a verification method for ICO project owners and bounty managers.

I think bounty managers and ICO project owners are not going to follow those things. Because they need to collect funds for free and flood their scam projects on social media. I think bitcointalk to have to get action with those problems and time to change this method.

[kawetsriyanto]

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.
~snip~

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.

~snip~

I am with you brother, I really agree with your suggestions above.

1. Yes, it will be safer if they do deposit in an escrow account firstly, 0.1% of the total amount (of the softcap) is a good number I think.
2. Will the list of the trusted bounty managers posted on bounty section, brother? If it can be listed there, It is the right way, It can remind all parties related to bounty activities about the experienced bounty managers with good track records.
3. Yes, that's nice idea. It can be more simple if all participants put their ETH address on their profile. So bounty managers will note it.
4. Yeah, I don't understand why they blame the bounty hunters whereas It is a hard thing to do by bounty hunters.
5. I have been waiting so long to see the implementation of this idea. KYC must be applied for promoters, developers, bounty managers, or all the team members of an ICO if it is possible. I think it can be one of the ways to minimize the scam ICO projects.   

[djuragan]

Implementing on all of those mentioned in the first post would be able to filter project that has a good quality and some scam project.
That way should be able to minimize the possibilities of people making a scam project.

[markieeeloy]

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.

I guess you didn't read the thread properly. I am not saying that the bounty manager should make the deposit and escrow it. I was saying that the ICO promoters should do that. If they are planning to raise $50 million, then they should at least be having 50K in their hand, right?

Brother you got a good point. Because nowadays, mostly all of the ico's turned into scam. And the big investors need assurance. Making their own research wont fit if the team itself planned to scam the ico. It is a good move to make assurance that it wont turn into next big scam. Very good information brother.

[olsyd]

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.

I think the same must be done when someone wants to create a bounty thread and amount must be equal to a minimum 50% of a bounty pool.

Bounty area really has big problems with keeping rules not only from bounties members side but from project and bounty managers side and this area needs big changes

[iconoclast]

I understand why you might suggest these as solutions but I think that all the problems with bounties can be solved by market based solutions rather than trying to impose rules.

1. Your idea for an escrow account won't work because either the amount will be too big and deter some great projects from coming forward or too small to be any real deterant to the scammers.

2. An approved list of bounty managers is a horrible idea. They will become a union and just demand ridicules sums to manage bounties. I generally avoid bounties done by well known bounty managers because they are oversubscribed and pay poorly.

3. Again, it should be up to the person running the bounty whether they enforce this rule.

4. Token dumping is caused by giving big discounts in Private sales and Presales. I don't invest in ICO's if they offer more than a 10% discount and don't include a mandatory hold period. The solution is educating investors, not unenforecable rules that inconvenience the honest and will get ignored by the dishonest.

5. KYC is a good idea but it should be for everyone working on the project. Don't see why you would want to exempt level 2 DT as that would just create a market for DT selling like we see with merit.

I don't think that Bitcointalk is capable of acting as an ICO policeman with any real credibility as they can't even deal with corrupt practices on the site like merit selling and people buying high rank usernames. The market will find solutions as we are already seeing with exchanges acting as ICO sponsors and people creating trusted bounty platforms and incubators like Iconiqlab.

[Hanebel]

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.

I agree all on these but not 100 percent for item #4. There should also be a condition that the promoters should hold on to 90% of their tokens for at least 12 months. I just don't see it is too effective. If it is applied, we can also expect a big dump on the 12th month.

[Omtamvan]

some suggestions are very helpful and useful. I see a lot of bounty manager and some of them hit by red trusts with information promoting the bounty scam. of course, this makes selective in choosing the bounty would be very necessary if you want to get a lot of results as desired.

[U2018]

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, most of the current bounty managers are very lazy. They didn't update data in spreadsheet for a long time. Some bounty managers said that they will update spreadsheet after the bounty campaign over. In my opinion, this is just an excuse for their laziness, in fact, updating the spreadsheet every week is more conducive to protecting the interests of the bounty participants.

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.

There are many well-known bounty managers. In fact, well-known is not equal to trusted. Well-known bounty managers may also manage scam bounty.
I have seen many well-known bounty managers accused in the Scam Accusations/Reputation section.

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.

This is very necessary, especially for newbie, it is very difficult to find a credible bounty, I have joined some bounties in the past, after a few months, they didn't pay me at the end. I was very angry, but no one could help me, I couldn't predict who was scammer. I believe that most newbies also hard to distinguish a project is a real bounty or scam.
If KYC must be necessary for ICO promoters and bounty managers, then I believe that there will not be so many scammers, and for bounty participants, especially newbie bounty participants, it can be minimized cheated.

[coin8coin8]

I guess you didn't read the thread properly. I am not saying that the bounty manager should make the deposit and escrow it. I was saying that the ICO promoters should do that. If they are planning to raise $50 million, then they should at least be having 50K in their hand, right?

If ICO promoters should make the deposit and escrow, I guess they might do like this: “Using tokens to deposit instead of money or bitcoin”.
I noticed that there are some so-called escrowing, no real money, they deposited their tokens, and claimed that they have been escrowed, but these tokens are likely to be just some worthless shittokens.
So if there are further suggestions, I think should ask for Bitcoin/Ethereum to make payments instead of tokens , and before a bounty campaign begins, need to deposit Bitcoin/Ethereum to the escrow account.This is the most credible solution.