If no one wins the contest, it proves nothing. But contests like this are a bad idea for another reason: people will hoard bugs instead of disclose, sometimes

If no one wins the contest, it proves nothing. But contests like this are a bad idea for another reason: people will hoard bugs instead of disclose, sometimes for years. For example, the Pwn2Own contest boosted the discovery and disclosure of bugs in browsers for the first few years, but now companies have co-opted it into a marketing event. They sit on exploits in order to win two or three years from now. I noticed a bug in one of the Telegram clients when the first contest was announced, but it wouldn't have qualified. Now the reward has tripled, and the scope expanded. As the user base grows, the reward will go up again (and again), and I'm sure no one will claim the bug since real experts have better things to do, so maybe it's smart to wait, maybe not... Telegram, and other projects thinking of doing this: think small. In the lottery model, there is one big winner; you should prefer a model with many (smaller) winners. Pay for patches that improve the quality of the code base, fix compiler warnings, improve documentation, etc. Many grains of sand will sink a ship.