Agreed. Could be fiat or some sort of crypto currency that requires the submitter to have a vested interest in the outcome.

Honestly, I would love it if I could front some money in order to have the devs look at my PRs. Half my PRs just go into the void and nobody looks at them until some staleness bot inevitably closes it.

This is a similar problem to resume spam. I always wish I could pay $5 when submitting a resume with the guarantee that someone would actually look at it and give me a fair shot. If I ever run a place I want to experiment with only accepting resumes through letter mail or in person.

I want to extend this idea to email. Use encryption, but for proof that the email can't be read, instead of for security/privacy (not that I'm against either of those).

Update the email protocol so that all messages must be encrypted. Not "by default", but by necessity. The server rejects them if they aren't encrypted and signed in a way that proves the decryption key is on a block chain.

The only way to put the key in the chain is to submit a micro payment. By "courtesy" , but completely subject to the recipient, the users client will refund the payment 48 hrs after it has been decrypted/read. Only if they click "spam" then the payment stays on their ledger. This would kill spam overnight.

The two downsides I see so far are that the chain is a single point of failure for everyone, and it would cost people a few bucks and some friction to get the clients set up. Plus the coin would have to be very low transaction cost, and still fully redeemable for actual value somewhere.