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> It makes sense to have some expiry. Else you can be left holding hundreds of thousands of dollars of people's money that will never return, forever, which re
by troydavis 6y ago
> It makes sense to have some expiry. Else you can be left holding hundreds of thousands of dollars of people's money that will never return, forever, which really complicates your finances.
There's a pretty simple answer here: return it to the person who posted the bounty. Other options could be letting them donate it (minus standard fees) to the maintainer(s) of the project that their bounty applied to or to an OSS organization.
The choices aren't just "Hold on to it forever" and "Take it for Bountysource." It's on the books as a liability for a reason, namely, it's not Bountysource's money.
(There's also an entire ecosystem for unclaimed property, which is where banks distribute money from customers they can't locate: https://unclaimed.org/ https://unclaimed.org/)
- rkangel 6y agoReturning it to the person who posted it may not be possible - card expired, can't get in touch with them etc.
- josephcsible 6y agoThat's a reasonable point, but they could have addressed it without keeping everyone's money. People would be a lot less upset if you had a 30-day grace period to claim a refund whenever a bounty expired, and only forfeit it if you ignored that. But they didn't do that, and are keeping everyone's money even when returning it is possible.
- 013a 6y agoSo, because it may not be possible in what is legitimately a small minority of cases, it should never be done in any case?
- tedivm 6y agoPlus there's actually a way to deal with that- California operates an unclaimed funds/property division that companies are supposed to hand money over to if they don't have the right to it. My wife actually found out that she was owed money from a previous medical provider who overcharged her- just had to fill out some forms. You can't just steal people's money because it's inconvenient to return it to them. https://www.sco.ca.gov/upd_msg.html https://www.sco.ca.gov/upd_msg.html
- ViViDboarder 6y agoEvery state does this. It’s called escheatment.
- coderintherye 6y agoEven in that case, in certain jurisdictions you are required to send the money to the government in a process called 'escheatment'. If the person comes back looking for their money after that point then they have to go to the state and prove that it is theirs in order to get it returned.