BAGS and the Creator Economy

Written in the first flush of the Gas Town launch, and the listing Steve has flagged with a thumbs-down; his note above tells you how the week actually ended, which makes the essay itself the before picture. The story half is Steve auditing his own scam radar in real time: a childhood of Ed McMahon sweepstakes checks, the Nigerian Prince years, a UW classmate socially engineered out of $5k in cash — every alarm a Gen-X skeptic owns goes off, and he goes for it anyway after "approximately 359 milliseconds" of deliberation. Along the way a Charles Schwab branch visit goes badly enough to earn its own warning, and the running joke writes itself: the crypto rails worked instantly while the regulated bank wanted a soggy handwritten slip of paper.

The argument half is looser, and Steve concedes as much: the whole thing is speculation, "in more ways than one." Bitcoin gets waved off as rarity for rarity's sake, "like LV handbags," while the fee mechanism that just paid him is offered as a prototype for funding solo builders once AI floods the world with them. The predictions are checkable and dated: everyone vibe coding within "2 frontier-model upgrades. Call it summertime," indie software hitting the corporate kind the way indie music hit the LA labels. Read it with the disclosure paragraph he stapled near the top in view — he knew exactly how this would look, published anyway, and the page you're on records what he thinks of that decision now.