Elements of a Bounty

I  have been thinking a lot about bounties these days.

What has been most surprising - although in hindsight it shouldn't have been - is how many people active in the crypto and blockchain space hear one thing when they hear or think of a bounty.

They think of a bug bounty - a specific task that has one winning response.

And then they code for that.

Why that is surprising in a regrettable sense is simple: they are coding the corresponding smart contract too tight. In other words, they should code for a wider array of potential use cases.

This is what Max Brody and Cameron have done with Cent. They have really re-imagined the bounty, and the use cases of their more widely thought bounty contract have grown into the double digits.

I can fully appreciate that now.

But that doesn't mean I can't learn anything from thinkers still stuck in an old paradigm.

On the contrary, I was able to learn the proper taxonomy of a bounty yesterday reading a series of articles. There are four (4) elements of a bounty:

• Issuance
• Fulfillment 
• Acceptance
• Payment

I personally find the following classification helpful as well:

• Invitation to Bid (ITB)
• Bids
• Ranking
• Rank-based payment

In construction, ITBs are essentially invitations made to contractors to design a new piece of infrastructure. Often, to compensate each bidder for the time and resources required to put together a proper bid, a trivial sum will be provided to those who issue bids that are not initially disqualified.

Each question on Cent is an ITB. Users that submit bids that provide value either to the original poster or any other user can be rewarded with a portion of the bounty by being up-voted. Less effort is wasted (i.e. uncompensated) and more value is created, for multiple parties.

Such an incentive structure, as basic and simple as it is, can be used for all types of cases outside of trying to identify bugs in some code.

Cent still has a long way to go, but it is important to highlight that it has made possible something that really wasn't possible prior to it's creation. And that is probably why I can't stop thinking about it.