Doesn't fix the problem. Actually makes it harder: I shouldn't have this level of management forced on me. Perhaps the repo owner (or whoever manages pull requests) should receive an amount? Obviously this could be abused too.
What do you mean? You are the repo owner and you set up issues with a specific value, then whoever submits a pull request (merged) for those issues automatically gets paid.
Or maybe I didn't properly understand how it works?
I was thinking more along of the lines of sferik's situation, where someone other than the repo owner funded the rewards. I certainly am not interested in paying anyone to improve any of my projects, but if any were valuable, a third party might.