[dwattttt]

I always assumed it wasn't the cost per say that provided value; malware authors certainly could lay hands to $630. The value is in actually asserting authorship & tying it to a legal identity.

I'd assume creating a fake persona / faking whatever is required to satisfy the identity checks that come with that $630 is the actual deterrent. If it was cheap to perform the actual identity checks it would still provide this effect.

[TeMPOraL]

And arguably the issue also isn't with money - it's that the value in "actually asserting authorship & tying it to a legal identity" is primarily a value for commercial vendors and platform owners. It's forcing open source developers to entangle themselves in the very system that open source culture is (or was) fundamentally in opposition to.