I've been critical of blockchain in the past because of the lack of use cases, but I've gotta say crypto functions pretty well as an underlying bug bounty system. This probably could have been a much more insidious and well hidden attack if there wasn't a quick payoff route to take.

That argument only really makes sense if you assume the attackers aren't rational actors. If there was a better, more destructive way to profit from this kind of compromise, they would either do it or sell their access to someone who knew how to do it.

Ah, apparently other people had thoughts along the same lines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45183029