That's the world today - ignore facts that don't agree with your reconceived views and deny deny deny. The problem with exploiting vulnerabilities for personal

That's the world today - ignore facts that don't agree with your reconceived views and deny deny deny. The problem with exploiting vulnerabilities for personal gain is that you're hurting more innocent investors, too. It's kinda like carpet bombing, in that you'll accomplish your goal of killing the enemy, but you're taking a lot of other people with them because they have a spurious link. OTOH, maybe you can gain enough influence to make changes that would marginalize or punish the corrupt operators. A lot of these quasi-cryptos have a hidden layer to prevent this (Ripple, IOTA, etc.). Their coins are more like unregulated stock in the founder's company than a decentralized machine. I'm not sure if that makes them more or less susceptible to a single, strong outside force. They could simply delete your coins, but without knowing the exploit that's just temporary. You would have an actual target (other than 'the system'), which you could pressure (aka blackmail), but they could cash out immediately and walk away. If I was running a scamcoin (and a terrible person) I'd probably bring the exploit finder into the inner circle to gain positive media (with the associated price bump), wait for the first major act of the new person and then cash out, step down, and disclose the vulnerability. Spin it as the new person trying to cover up problems they caused or improperly addressing the original problem and preventing a good solution. To counter that, the exploit finder could condition their involvement on releasing the hidden layer's source as a matter of transparency, but really be working on a way to fork without the hidden layer or replace it with a democratized layer. Now you can claim the founders were greedy and didn't want to fix the exploit, and that your working solution was rejected because it took away their ability to manipulate the market. Turn it into an announcement of the new 'fixed' coin. It'd be a fun movie plot, but probably terribly boring to watch.