Bitcoin has a current $800 billion dollar marketcap.
Lets say 1 of those IT security researchers find a vulnerability in the Bitcoin C++ code today. How much is a bounty is worth for paying this IT researcher to potentially save a $800 billion dollar blockchain? Priceless? I'm sure its not to make their CV's look good to land a good tech job at Facebook getting a 80k salary a year
It's impossible to prove the inexistence of anything, but there are (most probably) no bugs that allow an attacker to just move all BTC in existence into their pocket Lets say 1 of those IT security researchers find a vulnerability in the Bitcoin C++ code today. How much is a bounty is worth for paying this IT researcher to potentially save a $800 billion dollar blockchain? Priceless? I'm sure its not to make their CV's look good to land a good tech job at Facebook getting a 80k salary a year
It is other bugs, smaller things usually that are found. Also I don't think there are bug bountys for Bitcoin Core, since there's no corporation or anything behind it that would pay them. I was talking in general, since you asked why people would voluntarily look at open source projects and search for bugs.