BAGS and the Creator Economy

I’ve told this bizarre story to a few people now, including my wife Linh, who was certain it was a scam, and everyone’s eyes cross trying to understand it. I told it again at lunch to some old colleagues, same reaction. It’s hilarious to watch. I wish I could see your face as you read this post.

Edit: I think it’s important that you be aware of two things. One is that I am making money off this post (to be spent towards Gas Town tokens) simply by describing what’s happening. Second, I’m not endorsing buying crypto, though I am very happy that people are doing it.

Disclosure: I receive creator royalties/trading fees associated with $GAS trading on the BAGS platform, and I may benefit financially from that activity. I did not create $GAS and I have no ownership or control over the token or its smart contract (including no ability to change token terms). $GAS is not equity and does not give you any ownership interest in Gas Town or my work. This post is for informational purposes only and is not a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any token. Crypto markets are volatile and speculative — do not risk money you can’t afford to lose. References to “fees” or “market cap” are historical anecdotes, not guarantees of future performance.

I was on a Gas Town thread on LinkedIn on Monday, and noticed that one of the commenters was saying something along the lines of “yo Steve, you have $49k in BAGS and you might want to claim it. Geoffrey Huntley picked up his $56k last week.” I was mildly annoyed, and was about to ignore it and move on, but the mention of the prestigious Huntley had somehow turned it into Schrödinger’s Spam.

After mulling it for an hour or two, I DM’ed them asking what it was about, and the commenter replied with a big long string of words that I didn’t understand at all. Looking back, I’m sure my eyes were crossing when I first heard the explanation. I’ve included the screen cap. You be the judge.

In other words, this unknown Internet Person was telling me that blah blah blah blah stuff stuff stuff blah there’s a lot of money waiting for me blah blah blah more stuff… as long as I buy some Solana to unlock my earnings.

Woah, what am I, some sorta dumbass? Well yeah, actually. So I went for it.

Long story short, I actually did claim my earnings this morning; the total was up to $68k by then, and it’s $75k now. And by the time this post makes the rounds, well, let’s just say I’m going to have some more claiming to do. The hardest part of the whole process was my dipshit bank, actually.

Would you like to know more? I’ve been studying this from all angles and it’s still one of the weirdest things I’ve encountered. Allow me to get richer just by telling you about it. Maybe the catch is I’ll go to jail! If that happens, at least Huntley and I will be able to hang out.

Overcoming a Lifetime of Suspicion

When I was a kid, a long fuckin’ time ago, this ancient looking dude named Ed McMahon (who was probably a lot younger than I am now, lol) would go to people’s houses and surprise them with giant-sized checks for millions of dollars. He would have been an annoying influencer today. It wasn’t actually him, it was AFP but whatever, everyone thought it was Ed. And everyone subscribed to those sweepstakes and gave Ed some of their money. Every dumbass middle-America household, including mine.

It was all a huge scam and Ed shoulda been behind bars and Publisher’s Clearing House got sued repeatedly by the responsible U.S. government, back when we had one. PCH finally closed their doors for good in 2025, ironically the same year our responsible government did the same.

As a result of all this hooha, everyone in my generation grew up extremely distrustful of anyone saying “You can win free money, just like people you see on TV, with just a small up-front fee to unlock your potential.” There’s always a deposit required to unlock that invisible magic free money. That’s how you tell it’s fake and you ain’t gettin’ shit.

The 1990s were filled with email scams like this, too. The whole Nigerian Prince was a real thing back then, and they got thousands of grandmas. And real-world scams too; we knew a guy at UW in our CS undergrad program who got scammed in person out of $5k (via ATM withdrawal) by a couple of very talented Eastern European social engineering scammers. It was a wild story. He was really shaken by it.

And we know that with AI, new forms of social engineering and phishing scams are right around the corner. Imminent, even.

So yeah, this BAGS message about free money had some alarm bells going off.

Sending a Check to the Prince

But like I say, I’m a dumbass. So I told my wife, “hey Baby, some person I don’t know online told me I have $49k waiting to claim for myself, and I just need to set up a wallet and deposit a small amount into it directly from my bank account to unlock the funds.” I think you can imagine the look she gave me. A warranted look, to be sure.

Except, this unknown Helpful Person had mentioned Geoffrey Huntley, author of the famous Ralph Wiggum official Anthropic plugin, and they also gave me a pointer to the site where this alleged trading was all taking place, on bags.fm.

I figured, what’s the worst that could happen? My bank account gets drained, identity theft, my other accounts get drained… meh! I’ve still got Gas Town, which is gonna be the biggest thing ever.

So after thinking it over for approximately 359 milliseconds, I decided to take the plunge, save the Nigerian Prince, and spent the next several hours on the phone with my bank and then driving through the rain to give my bank a handwritten soggy slip of physical paper with my name and some account numbers on it, because even fancy banks aren’t that much different today than they were back when they were getting robbed by people in stagecoaches. By comparison, all the BAGS crypto-side stuff was totally squared away and worked instantaneously.

The guy at the desk (I can’t resist, this is at Charles Schwab for a new investor checking account, the whole experience was uniformly awful from phone to branch) wants to know why I’m opening the new account, since it has an attached brokerage account. I tell him it’s to collect my $50k of crypto money that Gas Town currency speculators created in $7M of transactions in the past 24h, and as the creator I’m entitled to 99% of the transaction fees.

He looks at me like I said it’s for bioterrorism and asks me a bunch of increasingly incredulous questions. The more I explain the less he believes me. At some point he has asked even more than my wife did, and I’m starting to get irritated; I have a lot of money with these twats.

So anyway, Schwab tells me it’s gonna be 10 days before I can have my debit card and I just bypassed the whole damn thing and went with a different bank, and finally claimed my $GASfees, which were up to $68k when they finally hit my wallet. It’s at $76k in the screenshot I just took.

All makes perfect sense so far, yeah?

OK, I confess. I don’t know what the hell is going on either. But let me tell you what I have figured out. Don’t use fucking Charles Schwab. And also…

Note: The next few sections are about online gambling in all its forms, where “investing” is the buy-and-hold long-form “acceptable” form of gambling because it’s tied to world GDP growth. Cryptocurrencies are subject to wild swings and spikes, and the currency tied to Gas Town is on a wild swing up. But it’s still gambling, and this stuff is only for people who are into that… which is not me, and should probably not be you either.

BAGS is a Market for Fueling Creation

People love to bet, and they bet on all sorts of stuff. They go to casinos and horse races, they bet on games and sporting events — some of the biggest companies in the world are for online gambling.

In the stock markets, people are betting on whether companies will grow. There are all sorts: commodities markets and futures markets and crypto markets, all manner of places you can go to make money by predicting winners.

Many types of betting provide little benefit to humanity. But to my surprise, BAGS is an innovation engine, similar in some ways to the stock market, where people are trying to predict and foster corporate winners. BAGS is a trading market targeted at predicting and fostering creators: individuals or maybe small teams who are out there creating amazing things.

As we move into 2026 with tools like Gas Town, individual creators will be able to produce things that rival the output of big companies. One creator can make a product using Gas Town that would have taken a whole company before. Creators are a force that is quickly beginning to matter at a global economic scale.

But the stock market isn’t pointed in that direction, and that ship is way too big to turn that quickly. That’s where BAGS comes in.

Is BAGS Just Bitcoin in Disguise?

BAGS is a cryptocurrency market that supports creators. The investors are betting on whether some creator’s thing will be a hit. People create tokens/coins in Bagsapp, which are are bought and sold, and their value floats on an open market. A creation’s popularity can be a signal as to whether it’s going to be a hit, and so the popularity no doubt drives a lot of the short-term movement in the market value of BAGS coins.

Because of that, it might feel, at first blush, like BAGS is just another form of Bitcoin or Dogecoin. But for Bitcoin and its ilk, the only trading signal is popularity, because the only value Bitcoin provides is rarity. That’s all they have. They’re like LV handbags. People want them because people want them. There are probably betting markets for high-end handbag prices at this point. There’s no real value to humanity in any of it. Bitcoin is sort of soulless. It has the world’s fanciest ledger just to prove someone dug it out of the mathematical soil and then sold it to someone else.

In contrast, the stock market directly and indirectly fuels innovation — even if over the short term it can be a popularity betting machine like Bitcoin. In the long term, the stock market rewards companies that demonstrate good outcomes. That’s usually earnings, but any good outcome can be rewarded by the market.

BAGS is doing the same thing for small creators. BAGS was structured by its own creator,

, so that the trading system’s “exhaust” (trading fees) becomes fuel for innovators. As the creator of Gas Town, I get 99% of those trading fees, thanks to the person who set up the $GAS coin.

That is where my magical Nigerian Prince Ed McMahon check money came from. It came from Finn, BAGS, and the $GAS community. Thank you!!

The Raging Creator Economy

So BAGS is an engine that fuels creation, just like the stock market. That’s not some sort of abstract marketing speak; I literally made $75k today from “market exhaust” (fees from people betting on popularity) which I, as a creator of something with legitimate value, am now able to re-invest in funding my creation, which increases the chance it will be an even bigger hit. So BAGS is an engine! Gas Town, the OSS product, is getting a huge boost from this cash influx from BAGS, the speculation market. Not so different from the stock market, is it?

Why do I think this is important enough to merit a big-ass blog post? Because with AI, the creator economy is going to dwarf the corporate economy. In the next 2 years everything is going to get turned upside-down, with people using code factories like Gas Town to speed up all knowledge work and indeed all online creation.

Millions of independent creators will appear when everyone can vibe code, which is roughly 2 frontier-model upgrades from now. Call it summertime. We’re going to need mechanisms to sort through all the noise to find the genuine hits. When the internet came out, search engines like Google and news aggregators like Reddit and Hacker News arose to help us sort through the giant pile of noise, to get to what we needed.

With AI, big software companies are facing an onslaught later this year: hordes of ravenous creators who have Gas Town and clusters of local GPUs. There will be so much great software that people will be turning up their noses at classic corporate offerings. It’ll be a bloodbath like the old Los Angeles music industry when indie music and then social media hit.

This is straight-up economic pressure at work. BAGS is an outlet for the market money that’s trying to find its way to fueling (and predicting) innovation — money that would have gone into the stock market if the stock market were anywhere near flexible enough.

The stock market is a great model: a strong, consensus-based signal of success for big corporations. We are going to need a market to do the same for the long tail, when it gets big enough to start wagging the dog. BAGS is well-positioned to become that market. I wouldn’t sleep on it.

BAGS of Cash

You laugh, and turn up your nose, and look me up and down with disdain, and say, “perhaps.” Perhaps, indeed. But when I was back at Google in maybe, I dunno, 2010-ish? I remember Google engineers were buying bitcoin at like ten thousand bitcoin per dollar, some crazy shit like that. There was a lot of buzz but I was like nah sleeeeeeeeeeep. I slept on it.

Now of course it’s easier to lose sleep over it. If you had spent a dollar on bitcoin back then, just over a decade ago, feels like yesterday, you would have ten thousand shiny bitcoins each worth $150,000 USD today. Each.

My point being that we have demonstrable evidence of pressure for a new trading market for the burgeoning creator economy. There is a sense of static in the air, like I felt back in 1998 at Amazon, where you can tell something really big is happening.

I have no idea which markets the money will find its way to, but BAGS seems exceptionally well-positioned to find a path similar to the one that Bitcoin did those fateful twelve years ago. Except unlike Bitcoin’s pure speculation, BAGS is at least theoretically, and by design, anchored on real-world long-term value, like stocks.

Back to $GAS Town

And now you know as much as I do. All this is just my own speculation, in more ways than one. But someone created a $GAS coin for Gas Town after I launched it. And they hit it pretty big. Gas Town went viral, the coin hit it big, and it has had millions of dollars in trades. And I got a pretty nice check from the deal. Last I saw, Geoffrey’s was up to $120k, nice work!

Now that I’m pushing into federating Gas Towns into Wastelands with my Highway Operating Protocol (HOP), I might wind up spending thousands a month, out of my own pocket, just to try to get this MIT-licensed open-source tool working for the world. Thousands a month that my wife assures me I don’t have available to spend. So I am grateful. BAGS is directly supporting my innovation and helping me improve it, and I am truly appreciative.

On January 1st I took all my chips and pushed them to the center of the table. I already placed my bet. I am 100% fine with promoting Gas Town, of course, as a product. And I appreciate the folks at BAGS for their social mission. I don’t think YOU should do any of this nefarious crypto gambling stuff. At all. But I heartily applaud the people who out out there making this happen.

I personally have bet my whole career and staked my entire professional reputation on Gas Town, and when I see a community of earnest young weird-word-using investors cheering Gas Town on, well, I hope they all get filthy rich.

Ah, me. Ten thousand bitcoin for a dollar. I remember the mailing lists, people talking about it. Anyone could do it. I probably would have done it and then lost them. I get why that one dude dedicated his adult life to digging in landfills for his hard drive.

Anyway, more delightful Gas Town content to come. Thank you very much to the BAGS community at large, and

for creating it. And a huge thanks to the Gas Town $GAS community on X for your support for Gas Town. I find your taste to be impeccable.

Let’s goooooooo! ⛽