> you can unassgin them
Anyway, this seems interesting. But as a developer who completes pull requests, what's to make sure I actually get paid? The buyer could easily reject a pull request and merge the code elsewhere anyway. You say the payment is pre-approved. Does that mean it's impossible for the original developer to get their money back?
It's true, a client can do what you describe but then we won't keep them as clients for long ;-) I assume in the future we can add a mechanism to ensure payment in case of such a code "theft", and I admit this isn't handled now. That said, we're talking rather small tasks, not complete projects here, and what you describe is not something that doesn't happen in real life, i.e. contractors that don't get paid. I assume that a developer that works on this system, saves a lot of time on marketing and clients relation and even if 1/100 tasks he is not paid for, it still be worthwhile than the alternatives.
With that in mind, could you use a variant of the same system to put a bounty on issues/tickets being resolved?
I don't know how to (in general) solve the problem of developers at large enterprises taking advantage of open source developers that are barely making ends meet. Nor the problem of developers being demanded to fix bugs or add features for the benefit of people who aren't paying anything for it -- but maybe this could be a start?