Just thought of writing a quick pointless rant / whatever discussion about the different referral systems in cryptos and ICOs.
First of all, what are they?
Bounty (goes by many names, same principle): You do X, Y & Z for a small number of coins in return for your effort. Typically these include (but not limited to) stuff like retweet, comment & like their tweet, join their Telegram group & invite your friends (you'll earn even more free coins, woohoo!). Basically, grow their crypto brand in social media for them.
Referral: This is probably more common & known one. You refer a friend or stranger through your referral link and you (or both of you) gain extra coins in return. Basically, you grow and advertise their project for them.
Why are these so attractive?
Who doesn't like FREE COINS!!!... fucking FREEE coins!!!! You can usually form them up pretty quickly too.
Why are they so damn effective?
Here's the fun part. These bounty & referral programs are absolute cancer in a way. I mean, you can grow even the shittiest idea/tech. to multi-million $ success with proper marketing. And that's what these systems are, marketing. They spread like a virus when done correctly. You can even make both of them for maximum advertisement. We all know at a certain point you'll get organic traffic to your social media even if it's full of "nice" "cool" "I like it" spam. As long as you keep marketing and hyping it up, you are generally able to keep on growing the brand and get more "investors".
One funny example on this is obviously Aelf Twitter and subreddit. By checking Aelf subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/aelfofficial/ you'll find it's a great place to farm upvotes on your posts (as there's a system where users are rewarded for upvoting the posts). I made one and got 2.4k upvotes. It's a challenge to find a post that has less than 90% upvote rate, let me know if there are any though.
Even though I'm not hating on these systems as they aren't necessarily anything new and they do help the "good" projects grow too. I've also made some free money from them myself. I'd still like to note why they are even worse in crypto.
Let's imagine you're just launching your scam ICO. Why would you not make a quick system to get people advertise for you? It doesn't cost you anything... Just reserve few % of the money supply you just printed for referral & bounty systems instead of giving it to investors. 30% team, 20% advisors, 20% marketing and 20-30% circulating token sale, what else do you want? Decentralization? Fuck off lol decentralization, what a joke.
As you can see. It's very easy to abuse the marketing with cryptocurrencies since you are practically printing your own money (tokens), just reserve some supply for free bounty & referrals. Anyway, enough bullshit, if anyone read till the end, I'm curious what do you think of these systems. Are they good and why? Will this get out of hand in the future? Maybe you could type at least: "nice" "cool" "I like it", that'll work too.
