That is what I meant to say, that you'd inform the maintainers along with your bet against the commit. In this thought experiment I assumed that the maintainers are already being spammed by AI so heavily that the bet is necessary to get their attention. (Neal Stephenson had something similar going in in Anathem, he called them "bogons".)

In the case where you're betting heavily in favor of a commit, maybe because you've reviewed it and think it's good, maybe because it contains malware you want to inject... you'd be attracting reviewer attention to that commit because if they can talk the maintainers out of it they end up with more of your money.

Probably the best strategy for a malicious committer would be to sneak through a low value nothing-to-see-here commit, because the low bet would not attract extra reviewer attention, so the maintainers have to set it high enough that it still incentivizes review.

I don't want to live in this world, by the way, I'm just afraid we might have to.

I was thinking of a similar idea to this, but for news/tweets/posts. As a consumer of media, I might decide to only read media with $x staked, so AI media factories need to be willing to stake that much to reach audiences, and will get penalized when they are wrong…

I imagine a hard problem is building a system to resolve these markets.