[everforward]

You're not competing against the hackers doing nothing, you're competing against them targeting some other country or just changing jobs. You don't have to get the payouts to $0, just low enough that it's not worth doing.

This would basically remove the prospect of million dollar payouts; it probably removes the prospect of payouts in the hundreds of thousands. Any company with the money to make those kinds of payouts is likely to have reporting requirements that make it very hard or impossible to hide.

Payments in the tens of thousands could maybe be hidden or targeted at small enough businesses that they don't have to report what happened to their money, but is it even worth it at that point? We're talking people with at least some level of technical ability; do they really want to piss off the FBI/NSA/European equivalents for tens of thousands of dollars? I sure wouldn't.