This sounds like a great idea until you think about it for more than 30 seconds. Similar to most "it's so easy, you just" ideas.

Seriously, chill, then think about how you'd implement it. Then think how it'd go wrong. Then think about how to fix those problems. Repeat until you realize there's a better solution or until you solve the problem without making it overly convoluted. More often than not the former is the better option. More often the latter is just a variant of the sunk cost fallacy and your ego. Reality is (un)surprisingly complex and solutions aren't usually trivial

Yeah, because we'd hate to allow people from poor countries to contribute to FOSS projects, right?

Or teenagers without full access to online banking.

Or the unemployed.

This is exactly the strategy that the owner of the SomethingAwful forum used in 2004 to get rid of bots and assholes. (I used to remember his name, kinda famous, oh well).

Interesting idea, I wonder about using it myself.

Let's say I'm a maintainer of an open source project on Github/Gitlab. How would you actually implement this deposit-refund loop in practice?

Then people from a sanctioned countries are blocked from open source, or worse, you have to explain to the bank and/or the government why you sent 20USD to someone in Venezuela.

Possibly the worst idea I've heard this month.

No one, meat or chip, would just set aside $10 "for the opportunity to contribute"

This is "let them eat cake" level of out of touchness.

This is an evergreen internet comment right here. Condescendingly proclaiming "This problem could be easily solved by [significantly worse solution that had 1/10th the thought put into it as the actual solution by people with a stake in actually solving the problem rather than making quippy armchair comments]".

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I know it's against convention to comment on downvotes, but really? Really? This is controversial? The OP came up with an elegant solution that cleanly solved their problem without subjecting contributors to anything more than a captcha. Then somebody comes along and says "oh, it's so easy, just charge $10. You're going to set up payment infrastructure, incur administrative overhead with human support managing refunds, and deter 99% of actual humans from contributing, and then call that the easy solution that OP is so stupid for not thinking of first? Give me a fucking break. This site really is just Reddit-lite, anyone who thinks about engineering problems seriously would realise this does not stand up as anything beyond a pithy internet solution with three seconds of thought into what actually implementing it would entail.

I semi-regularly offer drive-by PRs to projects I like and use. They're real PRs, not generated with AI. They range from papercuts to doc fixes to attempts to add that one feature that I want. Sometimes it's a drive-by group of PRs. Or an issue and a PR. I try to conform to what the maintainers prefer.

Unless I knew the maintainers personally, this would prevent most of my contributions, which are most often accepted. Maybe it's worth losing out on my small contributions to avoid slop. But things would absolutely be lost this way.

Why should I trust you to give me my deposit back?

$10 to a Silicon Valley software engineer reading this comment may feel like... $(a lot?)... to a range of other would-be contributors (thinking of $6/day minimum wages in some places, for example)

Wonder if a dollar would work for now until more people give bots credit cards.

Easily? You think the kind of people who think it makes sense to make bogus slop PRs are going to react reasonably to overburdened volunteer maintainers refusing to give them their US$10 back?

What? No. A PR is me giving my time to the project. I don't get anything out of it except the warm feeling of having helped out. If I have to pay money to submit a PR then I'm going to play video games instead.

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