You do not have to have a lot of crypto currency experience in order to find threads that interest you and to attempt to constructively engage with
various thread participants.  Through that engaging process you can learn and also provide your life experiences and opinions to the conversation, which may result in your earning merits....   You likely have a better chance with those kinds of interactive posts, rather than seeking bounty type activities.


Seems a waste of time to attempt to figure out why people give out merits.  I used a lot of my initial distribution of merits to give to posters that I already know and based on past contributions that I believe that they have made to me and/or the forum.  It is likely that the intitial sending of merits is not going to be as reflective as future sending of merit, and the system will likely adapt to members getting used to merit and perhaps looking at current posts rather than historical.  However, there is also a subjective component to merit, too, which leaves discretion in the hands of the person who has smerits to give (rather than attempting to make some kind of objective validation regarding which posts or posters are more worthy of merit, which seems a waste of time endeavor).