Summary

Steve Yegge recounts discovering he had tens of thousands of dollars in unclaimed creator royalties on BAGS, a cryptocurrency trading platform that generates fees from speculation on creator-associated tokens. Despite a lifetime of skepticism toward 'free money' schemes, he claimed $68-76k in trading fees from the $GAS token created by speculators betting on his Gas Town project. He argues BAGS represents a new kind of market that fuels individual creators the way stock markets fuel corporations, and predicts the creator economy will explode as AI tools enable individuals to rival corporate output. The post is part promotion, part genuine bewilderment, and part economic thesis about creator-focused financial markets.

Key Insight

As AI enables individual creators to rival corporate output, new financial markets like BAGS that channel speculative energy into funding creators could become as important to the creator economy as stock markets are to the corporate economy.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 6

  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.

• 7

  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.

• 6

  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.

• 2

  BAGS is a trading market targeted at predicting and fostering creators: individuals or maybe small teams who are out there creating amazing things.

• 7

  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.

• 6

  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.

• 3

  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.

• 4

  On January 1st I took all my chips and pushed them to the center of the table. I already placed my bet.

Tone

conversational, self-deprecating, promotional, speculative