BAGS and the Creator Economy

Published mid-January 2026, a week or so after Gas Town's launch. A stranger on a LinkedIn thread tells Steve that $GAS — a creator-coin somebody else minted for Gas Town on a service called BAGS — has quietly accumulated $49k in unclaimed creator royalties, and that Geoffrey Huntley already picked his up. Linh is sure it's a scam; the desk officer at Schwab looks at him "like I said it's for bioterrorism." Steve claims it anyway (the total is $68k by the time it lands, $75k when he files the post), and the post is the field report, explainer, and economics argument that comes out of it. The argument: Bitcoin is "soulless" — its only signal is rarity, like LV handbags. The stock market wobbles on popularity short-term but long-term rewards companies that produce real outcomes. BAGS, in Steve's read, is trying to be the stock market for the long tail of AI-era creators: a trading market whose "exhaust" (the trading fees) flows back to the person making the thing being bet on. Hence the cheque from a token Steve never minted — he didn't write the smart contract; the market wrote it for him.

The cash side of the same story Welcome to Gas Town and Clown Show to v1.0 tell on the product side, with the usual 2026 detours: the Ed McMahon / Publisher's Clearing House riff, the 10,000-bitcoin-for-a-dollar memory from his Google days, the closing worry that this might be the 1998-Amazon "static in the air" feeling all over again.