I've been thinking about  recently. If you haven't heard of it, check out the link. It is essentially an electronic 'cypto-currency' that allows for micro-payments as well.  If Bitcoin could somehow be integrated into the system, perhaps users could trade reputation for bitcoins, or set a bounty in bitcoins and the correct answer would pay them out as well as normal Stack Overflow reputation.   Just a thought.
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If we are effectively generating more traffic to Stack Exchange sites, would it become a better community if users were compensated somehow besides rep points? Even with minuscule alt coins?
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Suppose that John Doe mines 100 bitcoin at $0.11 each ($11) and doesn't sell them, but keeps them in a wallet.  Does he pay taxes the year he mined them at the price he mined them for, or does he pay taxes on the value he sells them for — like paying taxes on the $10,000 he receives when he sells them for $100 each?  And how does the cost of electricity factor into this, since each bitcoin (especially now) costs a lot of money to earn based on the price of electricity?
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I found a donation machine in a shop.    What does it do apart from take my money, if anything? I noticed it seems to break after a few coins.
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I've found many questions here regarding this 'feature' and many answers explaining how it works, but none showing any 'philosophical' concept behind it. i.e., why is it here? Is it helping to make site better?  For example, just now I made a downvote, retracted it to think a bit more, left a comment with explanation and tried to downvote again. No game. And this is not the only real-life situation when value of this 'feature' is doubtful. There're plenty on this meta.  So, what was the primary reason to introduce it? A flow of people who change all their votes on daily basis?
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A friend of mine trades Bitcoin and often asks me to pick up money for her, i.e., someone sends money to me (on my name) and I just pick it up and give it to my friend. The amounts are usually around $500.   Is this legal? Can I get into trouble doing this?   I have no idea who the senders are. Thank you.
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In the Pottermore article on  it's mentioned that other fractional platforms exist (7 1/2, for instance). Is it ever stated elsewhere where these platforms lead? Perhaps you could get a connection from your hometown by accessing one of these platforms?
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I am thinking of making a site which will have a forum. I already have a lot of users (in an old forum, which I want to renew).  I like the Stack Exchange concept (voting, reputation, etc).  Can I build one of my own on my site? (I don't intend to copy any source code, just the concept itself.)  Is the concept patented or otherwise legally protected, or is it free to use?
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While this is half tongue in cheek, this website and community may end up being the premier site that over half the world's programmers regularly attend - especially if Jeff and Joel create localized versions (with automatic translation, please).  The rep doesn't have a 1:1 correlation with experience, ability, etc. It does strongly hint at the ability to quickly comprehend and answer a variety of questions (check out the top 25 - few of them strongly specialize in any one type of question or answer).  It also strongly hints at an obsession and perhaps spending more time on this site than working, but there may be a balance point with optimal rep - enough to indicate expertise, not so much to indicate wasted time.  At some point Stackoverflow may hit a critical mass where hiring managers will understand and use it as a hiring resource - checking out not only one's rep, but the types of answers and questions the potential hire posts, and seeing how their peers respond to them (comments, votes, etc).  I can't see what the tipping point would be though, assuming it exists in the future.   At what point would you seriously consider adding a link to your SO user page in your resume? At what point would you seriously consider putting your rep number on the resume itself?  (before you say never, first imagine a world where this is commonplace, and then work backwards to see what drastic, unimaginable changes would have to occur before you felt it was useful) If you knew your future employer is going to be looking at your questions and answers, would you review them in advance and consider closing/deleting/modifying anything? Ancillary - Reputation represents time, and time can also be represented by money.  At what point will we see financial transactions involving rep?  This certainly would happen before rep became a resume option.
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Similar to , but a little less extreme..  Basically, you could "top up" the points of another users bounty (up to the current maximum, 500)  Say a question has a bounty of 100 points, I could contribute up to 400 of my points towards it it. When the bounty is resolved, 100 points would be deducted from the original user (well, 50), and 400 from me.  More than one user could contribute (again, up to the maximum limit)  If the question already has a 500 point bounty, this feature wouldn't apply. Also as cletus suggested, you should not be able to add to the bounty within maybe two days of the bounty closing.  Updated Suggestion: Acknowledging the inherent complexity, what if, when offering a second bounty, the user immediately agrees to forfeit control of who the bounty is given to &lt;-- the original user to offer a bounty does so, and further, the bounty expiration remains unchanged. This would help lower rep users.  They might not be able to offer the astronomical +500 rep bonuses that the 10k crowd can.  These +500's certainly attract more views than the +50s.  Presumably, the 10K users also already have the ear of the Stack Exchange Gods and need not beg so arduously for a feature on Meta, or have the visibility on [so] that their questions are answered quite quickly.  Right now, if they forfeited too much rep it would relegate them to maybe barely being able to talk in chat.  They might lose: 'create tags', 'retag questions', 'view close votes', 'reduce ads', 'vote down', 'create chat rooms', 'edit community wiki', and 'set bounties'.  While none of these are huge, it also makes that hope of someday getting to 10k appear infinitely further off in the future...  As an example,  is reasonable, maybe not stellar, but reasonable, so a low-rep user could offer a larger bounty in the hopes of getting on the "someday-we'll-implement-this-when-Jeff-gives-us-Friday-off" list.
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SO is not Open-Source, but I like the whole idea of Stack Overflow :   Giving bounties for Questions Up/Downvoting Questions The Badges The intelligent use of Ajax-Technologies Highly Rated users have administrative powers Reputation system Editing posts like a wiki   So I would like to program a (what is it called) Q&amp;A site / board / wiki system. Am I allowed to?
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This is a very silly question since nobody will actually do this because it makes very little sense in the real world but I just want to know how would it actually work if possible.  For example let us take an amount of 2 dollars and 2 cents and multiply that buy 2 dollars and 2 cents. Would the result be 4 dollars and 4 cents? The only way to make sense out of this for me is to treat them as vectors and multiply components.
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A woman on Facebook recently contacted my dad.  She asked him to get a bank account so she could send him money, and he would send money to her employees (about 12 people), and she would pay him for doing so each time. She said the last person who she had do this for her ran away with all her money. But he would have made more money continuing to do this money transfer thing for her. I am not sure if this is a scam or not. Sounds weird to me, but my dad said it’s worth the try.  I had to get the bank account in my name because my dad has bad notices on his records for falling for fraud traps and asking for refunds too many times. She stressed to him that it had to be the bank “American Christian Credit Union;” for what reason, I’m not sure. There is no large amount of personal money in this bank account, just the minimum amount to open the account: $25.  I’m skeptical about this and confused as to why this person would send a large amount of money to a random person on the Internet?  Has anyone heard of any scams like this?  What should I look out for?
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We at Stack Overflow are interested in setting up a security bug bounty program to begin rewarding users monetarily who report serious security vulnerabilities to us, and we want to know what the community thinks. This program will be run through  where we are currently testing features internally. Why offer money? We’re dedicated to ensuring our users' security and have long relied on our community to report security vulnerabilities to us. We’re very grateful for all the help we’ve received from those listed in our  and others who have helped us out with other minor things in the past. However, it’s become clear to us that this process isn’t enough — it's become commonplace for companies to offer rewards to security researchers, and many of those top security researchers naturally spend their time on sites which offer to pay them. That is why we feel it's necessary to start offering a reward to those who dedicate their time to aiding our development efforts through reporting these vulnerabilities in a responsible way. We feel that not offering a monetary reward for these reports makes us appear to care less about the security of our users to both our users and the hacking community. How much are you offering? If you’re not familiar with HackerOne, you earn a varied amount based on the severity of the vulnerability, as determined by our security team. We are still deciding on the exact amounts, but we'll likely start at the lower end of the spectrum (think: hundreds, not thousands of dollars). This is one of the things we'll need to evaluate as we put the program together and test it out. Are you finally implementing the Hacker badge? Maybe. The idea of awarding badges for those who report vulnerabilities has come up, but we have not decided quite yet. We plan to start a separate meta post about potential badges later on. Please do not focus on the potential for badges in this discussion, as we would like to gather input on the program itself first. Can I still get swag? Probably not. We previously offered site swag to those users who reported serious vulnerabilities. For now, we're considering the cash bounty to be a replacement for the swag. It's possible that in the future we'll offer both, but for now offering swag and cash would just double the complexity of awarding bounties. Do you have a timeline for implementation? After feedback, we'll likely start with a Private Beta on HackerOne with invited users who have previously reported vulnerabilities to us that resulted in something getting fixed, particularly those on our Hall of Fame list. We'll expand that list in waves as we fix issues, respond to feedback, adjust the rules of the program, etc. The Private Beta will initially be very limited in scope (starting with only our Enterprise demo site) and expand to our full scope as we get a feel for the system. Can I sign up for the private beta? You absolutely can! You can  to get on the list to be considered. As stated above, those who have reported vulnerabilities to us before will receive precedence in joining the private beta. We’ll then be selecting users who have identified that they have security research background, followed by any other users. Given the short period of time the private beta may be running, not everyone who fills out the form is guaranteed to get into the private beta before the program ends up going public. So what feedback do you want? Anything. We realize our communities have strongly been based on the efforts of our users contributing for free and that beginning to reward users monetarily in this way can seem like it undermines the spirit of Meta and the processes we’ve had in place in the past. However, we hope that our reasoning for pursuing this option is clear and warranted and, most of all, we want our users to be on board. If you have any further questions on something we missed or something you’d like to point out, please feel free to share your thoughts.
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Here's one to get shot down: How about letting bounties to be set using the reputation gained through the use of another site? So, for instance, I'm a programmer with a high Stack Overflow rep who hates using computers. Wouldn't it be useful for me to be able to exchange some of my excess Stack Overflow credit to incentivise a question on Super User?   Or perhaps I'd like to highlight a question on Meta Stack Overflow, but I don't spend my time there.
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How is this possible that the user with  question only has that little reputation? I've checked his site and he doesn't have a lot of downvotes or bounties.
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As discussed here:  offering actual money as a bounty sets the wrong incentives. However I would suggest giving users the ability to pay with money for offering a bounty regardless of their reputation. The bounty would still count as reputation for the receiving user but would not be discounted from the paying user's reputation.
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According to : "We like the little aliens."  This seems well targeted to appeal to the Stack Overflow / Server Fault / Super User audience, but way off the mark if the goal is to "make the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions."    There are experts who aren't interested in or focused on technology oriented topics.  Little aliens are unlikely to be something that someone interested in organizing a site on gardening would gravitate too.  No, I'm not suggesting that no one interested in gardening would be bother to look at a site with little aliens, but won't it be likely that the sort of mass appeal to to a very broad cross section of the internet will be lacking?