I'm excited about the mix of coding and compensation. As a coder with a strong open source ethic, I feel there are enough secondary benefits to direct compensation to justify the potential loss in 'pure' motivation.

The twist I would like to see, which I feel fixes the fluff commit problem, is to write unit tests associated with a coin bounty. It puts a burden on the test author to write tests that are not easily gamed, but thats good practice anyways.