Comment by OtherShrezzing
1 day ago
It’s not clear to me how you’d get anyone on the other side of that market. Anyone who is capable of understanding the wager would see the same thing you did, and not bet in its favour. Anyone who can’t understand the code will just pass the bet by and play some other market they do understand. The malware author is presumably not someone you can compel to do anything, never mind pay out a losing bet.
The way I imagined it, the maintainers wouldn't be considering a commit whose author was not willing to bet on its success.
This thought experiment took part in a world where the web was significantly worse than our own: hoards of malicious AI's and precious few humans trying to not be mistaken for a malicious AI. Of course a pre-existing trust relationship is much better, but ideally there'd be a way for untrusted authors to make it through to a real human somehow. Attaching money to the commit would be one way to do that.
However, your bet against it being merged incentivizes contrarian behavior by the maintainer in order to claim your wager for himself.
Similarly, betting that a public figure will still be alive a month from now is functionally equivalent to putting out a hit on him.