A suggestion for ICO promoters and bounty managers

[chandrarahmadewa]

..
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.

Yes, I am an honest member of the bounty campaign, strongly agree that there needs to be an action for a fake ICO. I understand the risk of participating in a fake ICO because I lost time, energy, and waiting for the TOKEN to land in my wallet
I hope that someday there will be ICO rules in this forum so that there will be no loss for the parties

[el kaka22]

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

That would even get a lot of team not to be able to use the platform for announcing their projects in the long run for such a huge amount. Sure, it is something they would get back, but the question the OP should ask is that, if he is a project owner, will he be willing to go through that length just to get his project announced to potential investors ?

Personally, I believe when it comes to ICOs investor and promoters likewise, they really would have a huge role to play when it comes to not investing in scam or investing in a scam ICO. Most people tend not to take diligence seriously because they are bounty hunters, but last time I checked, they are forgetting they are also giving their time and resources out to scam projects if they do that.

[Psalms23]

I really would like the idea of escrowed tokens or equivalent amount for the ICOs. I have been a victim of several ICOs that just disappear, and even the managers cannot so anything. I think bitcoin or eth should be better for escrowed in case the ICO disappear or does not reach their caps.

[supermine]

I have a suggestion and this is suggested by Yahoo one of the most reputed campaign manager from our forum he stated that even in bounty signature campaign the payment should be accepted only in BTC/ETH/LTC this will greatly reduce the scam bounties because they don't have much money to pay their participants upfront and this policy should be followed by all the campaign managers.

I think we need to move this discussion to Service Discussion (Altcoins) to get healthy discussion.

~snip~

If you forget to quote OP then it will be considered as plagiarism so quote properly to avoid permaban.

[semuxpool]

Maybe this year will be Bounty's last glory. In fact, bounty is now going down. This is caused by many reasons, because many scam ICOs have seriously reduced people's enthusiasm for ICO,This is one of the most critical factors.
The bounties that are now trusted to be usually those that payment weekly and already listed on the exchange. Other than that,all tokens are not trusted, because before they go exchange, everything is uncertainly, we can no longer pin our hopes on something uncertain, although the weekly payment of the bounty is usually not of high value, but it is the actual income, there is no bubble, you will not worry about scam.

[clever68]

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.

~ This is indeed a nice suggestion however, this will create an obstacle to those who want to be a bounty manager with the sense of responsibility in this field. While those bounty managers are becoming acquainted with this task, others should also be given a chance to get to start.
Moreover, think theres alot to consider before having a list of trusted 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.

~ I thought it had been implemented for all bounty campaign participants to post their ETH addresses in the 'location' field. This matter must be taken action by the bounty managers to lessen or annihilate the practise stated above & spammers.

[delton22]

The best suggestion i can give to ICO promoters and Bounty managers is this.

For Bounty Managers: in order to make your work less stressful and accurate, i advise you guys should have a Limit to the number of participants for every Bounty Campaign. Secondly try and Pay Bounty Hunters with Eth or BTC for they end up dumping the prices of the Project token when it gets to an exchange.

For ICO Promoters: Always do your best to promote an ICO

[Parkttw99]

the Scam issue has been known to all  But the difficult part is to get rid from it. Bounty Mangers should need to play vital role to minimize it. 

[masterrex]

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 with you in some points. But the question is how it will be implemented? Is it possible in this particular time as we see today ICO's/ITO's landscape are changing a lot since 2017. Comparing back then, there are too many ICO's running this time sharing in a small pie in the ICO market. I think its very impossible to fulfill those Suggestion for now. And in other cases the Bounty Managers has a rule also to take Extra Precaution or Pre Examine the project before introduce it as a Bounty Thread.

[Lake20]

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.

You are absolutely right, people are just self-centered and they don't care much about others.This even goes beyond bounty managers, there is a project that just finished ICO and rated high in most ICO rating site but with my findings on the project, it is an outright scam. I keep wondering why such a scam project was rated high thereby deceiving thousands of investors.

[drmasa]

   A lot of good propositions! I would agree on 1. suggestion, and that would solve problem of 2. so I dont think there would be any need for "trusted bounty managers" because there is a lot of work going through spreadsheets and bounty managers need help there.
   I would agree that promoters and managers have to go trough kyc, but I would also forbid advertising ICOs who hide team members.
It's ok to stay anonymous when you launch new project, but if you ask for money from people to start that project than please introduce yourself!

[BabatundeM]

I find this post quite enlightening as you have raised major contending issue in the crypto community. I hope there can be some standard regulations to curtail the way so many scam ICOs have flood everywhere which has lead to reduction in the confidence potentials investors have in ICOs such that even some legit ICOs no longer succeed due to the negative effect these scam project has caused amongst other factors.

[zabir.brutov]

I find your suggestions very helpful and hope some projects will follow your instructions. I agree, that most of the bounties are garbage at the moment and the ICOs should have more responsibility for failing to meet the soft cap or purchase a bounty.

[carlisle1]

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.

0.1% is just a chicken for the scammers if they can victimized larger amount from the investors,and if they are a legit project for sure they must have capital to put enough amount for escrow to prove that they will not intention to scam people around here,maybe 5% of the softcap for them to provide so investors will have faith and might invest even more

[masterkiller]

Maybe I'm not as senior as you in this forum who understand a lot of things, but there are some points that I disagree with, especially the selection of bounty managers. You just mention Lutpin and Yahoo as bounty managers that you believe in, it's like lowering the ability of others who might be better than them, maybe I mention some like Lauda, Btcltcdigger, Irfan sir and other bounty managers that I can't mention don't judge someone just because they are in our rank below, because it is not necessarily that we are better even though we are legendary. The calculation of the stake that is not updated may be because each bounty manager has their own style, and the other point may I agree

[Cahyono putro negoro]

I agree with the KYC system. 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.

[setyanis]

I have been a member of the forum since December 2, 2017 until now and I really got where you came from because I was involved in a number of gifts and considered myself as an intermediate level about the experience of hunting bounties. I want to argue in addressing your question.

1. The scam project is indeed a problem here. So as a bounty hunter we need to consider well about the project before joining, for those who are experienced, you will understand, but for beginners you need to learn more.

2. agree, I pay attention to that too. This bothers me when I see a spreadsheet that hasn't been updated for weeks, but I try to be patient waiting for the gift program to finish.

3. There are many hunters with twitter and Facebook accounts, which I think are purchased, because they are beginners and it takes a long time to reach a large follower of followers on twitter. These two things don't work together. Exactly what will be the solution for this is difficult to speculate.

4. I can't blame this on hunters because not all of them immediately sell coins or tokens they get from the gift program. the price is broken many things can make prices destroyed.

5. I really want to hold a few tokens with the possibility of the future, but it's very difficult as you say, because in the end, we lost (especially in this bear market). This is in line with the previous point where solutions for agriculture with many accounts must be found.

[biochem123]

I think that those are some great suggestions, especially the ones regarding the escrow, that would weed out a lot of scammers

[Pamahaw]

These steps should have been implemented long time ago but i don't know why it is not been done even in the proliferation of scam activities. They say that crypto should not be regulated that is why it is prone to abused.

I doubt if KYC submission is appropriate since we are in crypto and this peer to peer transaction is basing on trust but sad to say that not averyone is trustworthy.

[marksayson]

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.

I believe that this part must be fully implemented. I also was a victim by this. I have been submitting good quality blogs and articles on a specific campaign. And after a few weeks, when I check the spreadsheet, most of the users copy my blogs and articles because the admin give me a high score stakes. And they just edit a few typo in the username, and they change the receiving address to their address. And what was I angry about? The admin's just ignored my concerns and they even give them tokens for that!

Thank you for bringing this up. Truly I hope the bounty managers will read this and hopefully they can implement this kind of rules to fish out some spammers in the bounty campaign. Thank you for this. You deserve to get merited for this.