If PR is good, maintainer refunds you ;)
I noticed the same thing in communication. Communication is now so frictionless, that almost all the communication I receive is low quality. If it cost more to communicate, the quality would increase.
But the value of low quality communication is not zero: it is actively harmful, because it eats your time.
In that world there's a process called "staking" where you lock some tokens with a default lock expiry action and a method to unlock based on the signature from both participants.
It would work like this: Repo has a public key. Submitted uses a smart contract to sign the commit with along with the submission of a crypto. If the repo merges it then the smart contract returns the token to the submitter. Otherwise it goes to the repo.
It's technically quite elegant, and the infrastructure is all there (with some UX issues).
But don't do this!!!!
I did some work in crypto. It's made me realize that the love of money corrupts, and because crypto brings money so close to engineering it corrupts good product design.
Crypto has a perfect way to burn money, just send it to a nonexistent address from where it can never be recovered. I guess the trad fi equivalent are charitable donations.
The real problem here is the amount of work necessary to make this viable. I bet Visa and Mastercard would look at you funny if your business had such a high rate of voluntary transaction reversals, not to mention all the potential contributors that have no access to Visa/MC (we do want to encourage the youth to become involved with Open Source). This basically means crypto, and crypto has its own set of problems, particularly around all the annoying KYC/AML that a normie has to get through to use it.