Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns

The middle chapter of the Gas-arc, framed Q&A-style — a stack of "glad you asked" interjections that lets Steve cover a genuinely complicated protocol without slowing down. The Wasteland federates thousands of Gas Towns via a shared Wanted Board: anyone posts work, any rig can claim it, validators with maintainer-level trust issue stamps anchored to specific evidence of completion. Stamps are multi-dimensional (quality, reliability, creativity, plus confidence and severity) so reputation comes back as a profile shape rather than a single number — great at Go, mediocre at frontend; reliable but uncreative; crushes small tasks, struggles with epics. The stamps accumulate into a structured, auditable work history — an evidence-backed résumé you never have to write. The yearbook rule says you cannot stamp your own work, which is the line Steve draws between the Wasteland and LinkedIn. The underlying storage is Dolt — Tim Sehn and team's SQL database with Git semantics — which is what makes the whole graph fork-merge-pull-request-able. Federation is sovereign: each wasteland is its own database with the same schema, your rig identity is portable, and a rig proven in one carries that proof into the next.

It's the keystone of the Gas-arc — Gas Town is the cell, Gas City is the SDK, the Wasteland is the substrate that lets the cells multiply. Steve concedes the messy bits up front: a leveling system that ranked him above Linus Torvalds (thrown out before launch), an RPG metamorphosis nobody planned but nobody can stop, and an honest "we'll throw the whole thing out at least twice in the next 2–3 months." It also names the full credited team for the first time: Julian Knutsen (implementation), Matt Beane (skills and mentoring), Chris Sells (gastownhall.ai and community), Tim Sehn and DoltHub (storage), Brendan Hopper (federation model and roadmap).