If you intended to mean "direct" compensation I can agree, but I guess i was pointing out that usually people do things as an incentive and if the "core" dev team is still on board and do not get direct payments i'd have to say their "personal" investment increases over time (every 4 years?) and during bitcoin upgrades which in turn is their payment (or incentive).
I don't understand you. Do you mean that "investing" in bitcoin, and thus profiting from price rises (and suffering from price drop) is a kind of compensation for dev work? How do you correlate that to upgrades of the software at all, does the price rise consistently with upgrades?
If that's what you mean I have to disagree with you. After all, anyone can buy and sell bitcoins, and profit (or lose) without writing a line of code or running one test case. Personally I'm way to busy with both my day job and open source projects to do trading or such, so you could say it runs the other way.
There is nothing extra in it for developers. This is not meant as complaint, as the open source development I do is because it is fun working on a large-scale, high-impact project such as this, and not to fish for donations. But if you think there is some magical pot of coins guarded by the core developers that we only get to share in, that's a painful misunderstanding.
Having said that, if there was a chance to do open source development on bitcoin full-time and get paid I'd probably take it.
