But it will be gamed and abused by people that care about fake internet points. Those are very different people from those who want to extract as much money by any means available

If it gets successful enough that people really want to game it, the creator will have proven their concept and can try to tweak it as necessary. I think that would be a fine problem to have.

The basic incentive of money drives all sorts of things. Maybe the best “exploit” will be to find interesting and novel links.