Depending on the rules of the program you get either a share of the bounty or an exact amount. In chapter 4 I will talk about 2 platforms (Bitcointalk and Icotoplist.com) where bounties are posted. One has bounties where you get a fixed number of tokens per task and one has bounties where you get shares of the total bounty pool.

On crypto bounties they show you already an estimation of the amount that you can make on each specific task. All I do is take that value and divided to 3 for a worst-case scenario, in case the project gets minimum funding and/or the coin will drop rapidly after launch.

On Bitcointalk, for most bounties, you get a share. Here is how I calculate my possible share if I decide that the project is attractive.

I calculate the minimum bounty in case of ICO reaches the soft cap. Then I estimate the number of bounty hunters. This comes with experience or checking closed bounty programs where you can see the spreadsheets with the participants. If you do your research you will start to see a pattern.

I will take as an example a bounty that is already closed. The bounty was for CardStack ICO.

Here are the bounty rules. They promised a bounty pool of 1% of the total tokens sold. This project announced a hard-cap of $30–35 million, but no soft cap. So I ‘assumed’ a $10 million soft cap.

So the minimum bounty pool that I estimated was:
1% x $10,000,000 = $100,000
If the bounty would be a success the bounty is $300,000-$350,000.
But we are interested in the worst case scenario. So we will continue the calculation with the minimum bounty pool of $100,000.

I was interested in the article campaign. That campaign had a 30% share of the bounty pool. So, we have:
30% x $100,000 = $30,000

For article bounty campaign I estimated 1000 eligible bounty hunters. Now we have:
$30,000 / 1,000 bounty hunters = $30
Now some will get more, some less, depending on the article quality and reach. Each campaign has specific rules.

After this calculation, take in consideration that depending on the market conditions the coin might go up or down after launch.

For example in the past year, from what I’ve scanned, I think over 70% of the coins launched dropped in price. Some dropped even with 90% just in a few weeks or even days after launch.

So. After the calculation of the possible share, I like to divide that by 2 or even 3 to estimate the actual money that I will get.

At this point, I would have a minimum possible payout of $10-$15 for a 500 words article.

At the end of ICO, they reached over $35 million. They got over 3,000 submissions for article campaign. Out of those, a little over 400 got validated and paid.

Most decent articles got around 10,000 Cardstack coins. Once the coin got available on exchanges it hit $0,006. So that means that for a decent article you could’ve got $60. $60 that you can convert to fiat, other coins or hold those coin if you want to invest/gamble.

Another thing that I do when I see a project that I think it can be a success, but it is freshly announced and they don’t have much following to check engagement and people reactions, I either jump on the bounty if the payout seems really attractive or I check back in a few weeks. It depends on my mood and how much risk I am willing to take.

When I check for juicy bounties I am looking at bounties that most people are not doing. This way my chances are higher to get a bigger share.

So I chose even projects that have strict rules to participate in their bounties as long as they have great teams, great idea, and/or recommendations from authority figures.

Thinking about this now, I think that the most restrictive bounties I have seen were from a serious project. Scammers and projects interested only in money will not restrict their bounty program as they see this as their only chance to generate as much hype as they can with phony promises.

A few months ago some ICOs started to implement a verification, for bounty hunters, named KYC. This is something that was in place already for buyers on most ICOs. But it started to get implemented for bounty hunters as well. So I took the opportunity, prepared my documents needed for the verification and joined the bounties.