My primary rebuttal is that enough hackers don't want 1000x more than anyone else in the bug bounty program, they don't want the liability associated with reintegrating that money back into society
Somewhere in between bug bounties pricing and payouts now, and the incentive to cripple/steal everything for ransom, is the more accurate medium
You think we're all good guys and we'll get along, see? But actually, Bitcoin has enabled a new type of international warfare. And thinking positive thoughts will do nothing to prevent that.
The concept will never go away. The concept of computing a hash client side under an agreed upon set of conformity for eventually addition to a globally stored list of hashes. Although you haven't argued for making it go away, people that talk like you typically are arguing for the idea that the state can successfully make it go away. This concept works whether institutional exchanges say each hash is part of a unit worth $60,000 a pop or those institutions don't exist and the market says the units are worth $2 a pop.
But this will keep getting worse and worse until cryptocurrencies are outlawed. And this will not stop their use completely, but their value hinges on their trade value, which in large part depends on their legality. So the value will collapse to nothing. So now blockchains have no incentive to exist either. Poof.
and there it is.
My point was to explain why a trade tool's value is determined by its ability to trade with it, and demonstrate why legality of the currency itself matters.
If you don't understand this, you don't understand the concept of currency in the first place. Something being rare is not sufficient for it to have trade value.
You think the demand will evaporate if the cryptocurrency is illegal or hard to obtain. I think this is not true. Compliant hashes will still be easy to generate, acquire, and transfer and some people that they are transferred to will append the hash to a globally stored ledger. These concepts are not bannable.
You see, your proposal's math doesn't work. Acme has a system worth 100 million. This means a blackmailer can ask for 100 million if they find one bug (let's keep things simple).
Obviously Acme can't offer 100 million in a bug bounty program for every bug found. So let's say they offer 100k, they're very generous. This means after 1000 bugs found, they've transferred their entire worth to bug bounty hunters.
So while Acme had to create a system worth 100 million, they own 0 of it now. They gave everything to bounty hunters. Is this fair? No. What happened is that instead of one blackmailer, there were 1000 blackmailers saying "we're the good guys, we help you find bugs in your system, OR ELSE".
When a health industry keeps raising the prices on you, because they keep saying "we're the good guys, we help you not die of cancer, give us your house, OR ELSE" we love them right?
But that's not the end of the story.
Did the good guys who took all your money found all the bugs? Well a blackmailer still stands to gain 1000x more than anyone on the bug bounty program, if they can find a bug before the bug bounty hunters have leeched the host dry of their last drop of blood. So a malicious hacker is motivated to be faster, and financed to be better, with more people, better equipment, and so on.
So the bug bounty program is absolutely inadequate solution to the problem. Paying more to match what a blackmailer would ask, turns the bug bounty hunters into blackmailers. Except they also can't guarantee shit. And they can't cover losses for shit if they miss something either. They just take your money and leave you almost as vulnerable as you were.
So, no. Companies won't have bigger bug bounty programs.
Instead they'll do something that might help. Like move off the internet, making things more inconvenient for everyone, and insure heavily anything they put online.