I think you are kind of ignoring the issue that parent brought up.
The hn machine is not all that smart and can easily be gamed, and would, if the stakes were to become high enough. Farming hn karma by making pointed statements on crowd favorites (parent named two, oss licensing or privacy also spring to mind) gets you your 10k, no originality or honesty required, in no time.
What's protecting hn is a lot of moderation + relative irrelevance. If those 10k were to systematically bring you enough eyes (by driving search results), you are in effect printing money. There is no reason to assume the number of people doing it would not scale with the return attached to doing it.
Anything (points/karma/coins) which is free & unlimited will find it's way to get exploited. "What if" there's a barter system for karma/points, you do a +1 and get a -1.
Though I do not know how the initial allotment of karma/points could be distributed for the pioneers and for the new growing community, maybe allot 'n' points for new user after a year...
You know how it works here. We would strip you of your internet points if you start being nonsensical.