Bounty campaign’s purpose is to promote their coins by giving free money to its participants in a form of rewards. People tend to jump in because of the marketing plan
free money. The most common and well-known business strategy is
word of mouth, if it’s free why don’t we try right? People will tell their friends that it’s free, we are the pioneer of this coin, we need to participate on spreading our coin’s advantages among other cryptocurrencies, and hoping that the price of their coins (free money) will grow. This makes it more attractive to people, and get them more engaged. Bounty campaigns played a major role to these vast ICOs, you just need to examine the idea behind, and giving them
merit won’t work. Merit is already free; its purpose is to help the forum by:
Forcing people to post high-quality stuff in order to rank up. If you just post garbage, you will never get even 1 merit point, and you will therefore never be able to put links in your signature, etc.