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So, I have the ability to award a bounty because I wish to award a particular answer. So, I do that on the question. This implies

  1. I have already "lost" my reputation
  2. I decided that one of the questions is worth giving my bounty to.

Why must I wait 24 hours?

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  • 1
    possible duplic... oh wait. Related, anyway: I want to award a bounty to an existing answer, should I have to wait 24 hours?.
    – a cat
    Dec 28 '11 at 22:21
  • @lunboks Oh, it looks the same to me. Why do you think it's not quite a duplicate?
    – McKay
    Dec 28 '11 at 22:31
  • Because it's on MSO and closing as a cross-site duplicate isn't really possible.
    – a cat
    Dec 28 '11 at 22:35
  • @lunboks ah. that makes sense.
    – McKay
    Dec 28 '11 at 22:38
  • And I thought I checked for duplicates, and presumed I just wasn't very thorough
    – McKay
    Dec 28 '11 at 22:38
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If you give out a bounty immediately it seems potential abuse of the rep system where you could just rapidly dump rep to another user. If this is related to OMG, it's the HOLIDAY BOUNTY GIVEAWAY, I don't really care much for the whole pre-meditated bounty thing as people can just up-vote.

In any case, the "proper" use case of the bounty is to draw some additional eyes to a question, and as everyone is not always on (people sleep believe it or not), give other people a fair chance to craft a bounty-worthy answer. There may be a good answer now, but there could also be a great answer if you wait some hours.

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    This is what I was figuring to post, though with the added note of "The majority use case of bounties involves getting new answers, so we're not concocting special case scenarios for picking a specific bounty reason".
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Dec 28 '11 at 22:24

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