(2026-01-15) Yegge Bags And The Creator Economy

Steve Yegge: BAGS and the Creator Economy. 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.

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.

as long as I buy some Solana to unlock my earnings.

I actually did claim my earnings this morning; the total was up to $68k by then, and it’s $75k now.

they also gave me a pointer to the site where this alleged trading was all taking place, on bags.fm.

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.

He looks at me like I said it’s for bioterrorism and asks me a bunch of increasingly incredulous questions.

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.

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

People love to bet

In the stock markets, people are betting on whether companies will grow

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.

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.

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.

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.

But for Bitcoin and its ilk, the only trading signal is popularity, because the only value Bitcoin provides is rarity

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.

BAGS was structured by its own creator, Finnbags, 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.

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 (feedback loop)! 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.