It's unfortunate that it falls onto the responsibility of the mods to create systems around campaign managers not performing their duties properly. It only harms the campaign when one person claims to be doing the work of multiple people. I'd think ICOs would have to address this issue over time if BTT didn't intervene, possibly by prompting a new branch of community services to develop ranging from self proclaimed bounty police to independent bounty auditing services.
This makes more sense to me now, thanks for the clarification!
I still think that while this may have had an impact on a few hundred, the biggest factor is bitcoin price in terms of new account creation. The late 2017 bullrun had a huge impact on the variables and we can't compare the results to today or any period after merit was introduced unless we experience a similar situation in the future, so I remain skeptical of the numbers that average half a bullrun pre-merit and a bearish market post-merit.
As an example, here's what I'm seeing;
Prior to merit - From 1/16/18 - 1/22/18 on the 'New Members per Day Chart' there are roughly 5000 new accounts created each day(super rough numbers) and the price of bitcoin was averaging 11.4K USD.
Post merit introduction - we're still seeing between 4000-4500 new account creations per day around price spikes of ~11K
I believe the actual impact is a lot less of a reduction than the suggested 36% average because of these variables and I'd like to see data with similar conditions. Could we possibly get these numbers with December/January eliminated to see the lower average result?