Which, in many cases, is enough. Many times, fixing a bug is a few hours of debugging, then fixing three lines of codes.

Sometimes it just takes a monkey to sit behind a PC and bash on it frantic enough (with a debugger) to find and fix bugs :-) Competition to fix bugs is (up to a certain level) good, it gets people off their ass. But I think the competition problem is very hypothetical. It assumes there will suddenly be *a lot* of people that want to fix the same bug. That's unrealistic...

Writing a few test-cases (which is better than the 0 we have now) also won't take a Linus-level developer to work on it full time. A reasonable dev just needs to put some time into it.

That leaves the more difficult work to the lead devs.

For a distributed currency I must say there is very little belief here in a distributed process. Yes, you can also start a company and hire people to work on it full time, but then they'll be working on helping customer not solving bugs of the issue tracker (which might have an overlap, but not necessarily). And it also isn't clear whether changes are contributed back to the project.

You should not underestimate the open source community. There's a lot of smart students eager to work on interesting, high-impact projects. Bitcoin certainly fits that description, but the problem is that Bitcoin isn't really that known yet with devs, and they need a little push to get involved. And to work on the current code-base, because usually they will look at the code and decide it's a piece of crap and want to rewrite it (new people syndrome).

Yes, there might be one-time-and-run-off flakes, but hey that's life... you only need to gain a few (semi)dedicated devs from it anyway, not recruit an army of loyal minions.

I'm not saying this push has to be bounties. It could be a nice page, for example just posting the bounties on the forum is a start, but certainly not enough. They just get buried in troll poop, and a lot of the forum users are ... *psychological analysis removed*. You really want to reach out somehow.

It should at least have a nice page that attracts people on the bitcoin.org site, and explains why you should work on Bitcoin (because the project is so awesome and fun) and some form of attribution (not just a mention in the gitlog, but bounties is only one option) if you do manage to fix a bug.

Heck a scoreboard with "number of bugs squished" could be a start :-) We need to be creative here...

JS