The bounty system has been well-discussed already, but the problem I would like to raise is that of lost reputation points. By this I mean reputation points that were allocated "up front" but never attributed to anybody. I apologize if I have misunderstood the bounty mechanism, but in my experience this happens maybe for around 10% of the cases.
Sometimes the bounty poster just disappears, and sometimes he accepts an answer but doesn't grant the bounty. I even had cases where I received the comment of "Thank you, this worked" with no follow-up action.
I can only theorize that the poster hasn't read the FAQ, or his knowledge of English wasn't good enough, or that he intended to wait the required 2 days and forgot to come back. I don't assume that he didn't care about his reputation points, just that he made a mistake, a mistake that could maybe be corrected in most cases by suitable adjustments to the bounty system.
To minimize the wasting of reputation points and also awkward exchanges between poster and answerer, I would like to suggest the following changes :
Remove the 2 days minimum bounty-award period
This will avoid the need for the poster to come back just in order to grant the bounty. As we are dealing with hardware or software, where answers can be verified fast enough, and as an answer can be accepted immediately if it works, this should also be the case for the bounty.Reinstate acceptance as also granting the bounty
This will solve the funny case where an answer was accepted but bounty never granted. I was told that there were technical reasons for this separation, but technicalities can be overcome.Automatically grant the bounty to the best answer once bounty period has elapsed
I don't suggest for the most-upvoted answer to be accepted as it was before, just that the bounty should not go to waste if one most-suitable answer exists.
EDIT
This post is not another one about "why don't I get these bounties". It is about "why are people missing out on using their earned reputation". This never happens when the poster is a high-reputation member, but rather to low-reputation more casual posters, who sometimes blow up a substantial part of their reputation points asking for an answer, then end up never using it. Changing the bounty algorithms may prevent some of this from happening.