The bounty system was never designed as a way to transfer reputation from one user to another, even for an excellent answer. It was designed to bring additional incentive to bring a better answer to a question.

People started using/abusing it for this purpose - to award existing answers - but it's still a reputation transfer mechanism, and thus can be abused. You're not supposed to transfer reputation.

So people started complaining about it. We don't want to condone direct reputation transfer, but we also don't think that awarding existing excellent answers is a terrible thing either.

So we have a compromise. A 24 hour window for someone else to step in and blow the existing answers out of the water if they want to try to get that bounty, and it is a high enough bar that it actually works pretty well to stem the abuses of reputation transfer between accounts.

It is inconvenient, sure, but it ultimately doesn't prevent you from awarding someone for their hard work.

I should be up front, here. I am the reason this exists:

Why do I have to wait to "tip" a user for a great answer via Bounty?

I got rid of 3,000 reputation within a day or so by placing and awarding multiple 500 point bounties on meta, and it was determined that allowing users to do that was probably not a good idea... (source)

The bounty system was never designed as a way to transfer reputation from one user to another, even for an excellent answer. It was designed to bring additional incentive to bring a better answer to a question.

People started using/abusing it for this purpose - to award existing answers - but it's still a reputation transfer mechanism, and thus can be abused. You're not supposed to transfer reputation.

So people started complaining about it. We don't want to condone direct reputation transfer, but we also don't think that awarding existing excellent answers is a terrible thing either.

So we have a compromise. A 24 hour window for someone else to step in and blow the existing answers out of the water if they want to try to get that bounty, and it is a high enough bar that it actually works pretty well to stem the abuses of reputation transfer between accounts.

It is inconvenient, sure, but it ultimately doesn't prevent you from awarding someone for their hard work.

I should be up front, here. I am the reason this exists:

Why do I have to wait to "tip" a user for a great answer via Bounty?

I got rid of 3,000 reputation within a day or so by placing and awarding multiple 500 point bounties on meta, and it was determined that allowing users to do that was probably not a good idea... (source)

The bounty system was never designed as a way to transfer reputation from one user to another, even for an excellent answer. It was designed to bring additional incentive to bring a better answer to a question.

People started using/abusing it for this purpose - to award existing answers - but it's still a reputation transfer mechanism, and thus can be abused. You're not supposed to transfer reputation.

So people started complaining about it. We don't want to condone direct reputation transfer, but we also don't think that awarding existing excellent answers is a terrible thing either.

So we have a compromise. A 24 hour window for someone else to step in and blow the existing answers out of the water if they want to try to get that bounty, and it is a high enough bar that it actually works pretty well to stem the abuses of reputation transfer between accounts.

It is inconvenient, sure, but it ultimately doesn't prevent you from awarding someone for their hard work.

The bounty system was never designed as a way to transfer reputation from one user to another, even for an excellent answer. It was designed to bring additional incentive to bring a better answer to a question.

People started using/abusing it for this purpose - to award existing answers - but it's still a reputation transfer mechanism, and thus can be abused. You're not supposed to transfer reputation.

So people started complaining about it. We don't want to condone direct reputation transfer, but we also don't think that awarding existing excellent answers is a terrible thing either.

So we have a compromise. A 24 hour window for someone else to step in and blow the existing answers out of the water if they want to try to get that bounty, and it is a high enough bar that it actually works pretty well to stem the abuses of reputation transfer between accounts.

It is inconvenient, sure, but it ultimately doesn't prevent you from awarding someone for their hard work.

I should be up front, here. I am the reason this exists:

Why do I have to wait to "tip" a user for a great answer via Bounty?

I got rid of 3,000 reputation within a day or so by placing and awarding multiple 500 point bounties on meta, and it was determined that allowing users to do that was probably not a good idea... (source)