I agree with you for all except bounties. Why would anyone answer *just to get a bounty*? Of course, it "features" the question. However, it is possible to manually set up a bounty on Q2A, which means requesting an adminstrator to transfoer the bounty to the answerer from the OP's account.

People answer to get rep. This is most certainly the case: getting reputation is the incentive that drives lots of people to give quality contributions on StackExchange. Especially newer users who might have something valuable to contribute but need a bit of encouragement. I don't see why it would be any different on this site.

Yes, and it is important that good knowledgeable people can earn rep for a priviledge system (with the goal of allowing for community moderation by good users who know what they are doing and are knowledgeable in the topics of the site) to work properly. I hope expertise and rep will be a bit stronger positively correlated on the site to come, than on for example not explicitely research-level …

I can't seem to get your point at all here... Why would we want people who run after reputation?.

I don't think bounties are the only way people should be given reputation. If we don't like the idea of accepting answers, why would we want the concept of bounties, which is also unilateral, like accepting? .

Right... so of course you wouldn't care at all if your reputation was suddenly reset to zero on StackExchange, hmm? I totally agree that the most important thing is to attract people who are interested in physics and have interesting knowledge and ideas to contribute. People who just want rep should be discouraged. However you need some kind of incentive, something to make people proud of.…

I don't think anyone is suggesting that bounties are the *only* way to earn reputation. The main way will surely be getting upvotes on lots of answers, as usual.

@Mark Mitchison: OK, fine, I'm convinced (+1) although the only reason I'd care if my rep would be reset to 0 is that that means no privileges. Then again, people want to answer questions with bounties to get priviledges... OK, makes sense. By the way, accepting gives 2 rep to the accepter : ) ...

Yes, for the priviledge system to work automatically, there has to be some means to determine who are the good guys who should have the right to vote to close / reopen questions etc ... Rep is not always optimal for this, as for example on Physics SE I know some closevoters (or people who are at the verge of becoming ones ...) who are not knowledgeable enough to judge the merits of questions a…