I have seen the bounty list in the forum, can someone explain to me what bounties are/how they work?

Well its when someone places a (amount of tc) on a certain player and whoever kills or decaps that player gets the tc or something.

There use to be text that was put below the players name ingame but thats over with.
(Link) Thats a brief overview of what the layout looks like.

Heres a section on bounty and this will give you more info on it
(Link)

That bounty board is very old and you can't post there anymore. I wasn't able to collect much data from the board regarding the current bounty system, either. Anyway:

Victim = the guy you are setting a bounty on.
Amount = the payout, the amount of tc to be sent to the person that beats the other guy that you set the bounty on. I think the minimum amount this can be is 100 tc.
Bounty text = the text that describes why you put a bounty on the guy's head. This used to be displayed below your name in-game when you were playing.

Also, you automatically pay 2000 tc for the bounty to be set, this amount will not be included in the payout.

Personally, I think this system is old and definitely outdated, and because of the removal of the bounty texts it has lost a lot of fun value as well. I have no idea why or when the bounty texts were removed.

Back when I was new (late '13) bounties were uncommon but they still happened every now and then, but I never saw text ingame anywhere saying someone had a bounty on them, I may have never ran into anyone with a bounty though.

It was shown as a text under your belt, often something funny.
It used to be very common as the texts would stay there, even after losing, but this was a bug that was fixed around 2014 I guess.

I'm pretty sure the bounties still work, but as you lose the text after 1 loss nobody buys them.

Nope i havent seen bounty text under a players name since 2013.
After they fixed it or whatever i havent seen any bounty text.

They still work, they are just very uncommon and disappear once the person loses.