(2026-01-17) Goedecke Crypto Grifters Are Recruiting Opensource Ai Developers

Sean Goedecke: Crypto grifters are recruiting open-source AI developers. Two recently-hyped developments in AI engineering have been Geoff Huntley’s “Ralph Wiggum loop” (Ralph loop) and Steve Yegge’s “Gas Town”.

So far, so good. But Huntley and Yegge have also been posting about $RALPH and $GAS, which are cryptocurrency coins built on top of the longstanding Solana cryptocurrency and the Bags tool, which allows people to easily create their own crypto coins.

So what does $GAS have to do with Gas Town (or $RALPH with Ralph Wiggum)? From a technical perspective, the answer is nothing

Buying $GAS or $RALPH does not unlock any new capabilities in the tools. All it does is siphon a little bit of money to Yegge and Huntley, and increase the value of the $GAS or $RALPH coins.
Of course, that’s why these coins exist in the first place. This is a new variant of an old “airdropping” cryptocurrency tactic.

how do you convince a celebrity to get involved in your grift business venture?

This is where Bags comes in. Bags allows you to nominate a Twitter account as the beneficiary (or “fee earner”) of your coin. The person behind that Twitter account doesn’t have to agree, or even know that you’re doing it.

Once they start posting about it, you’ve bootstrapped your own celebrity coin.

Incidentally, this is why AI open-source software engineers make such great targets. The fact that they’re open-source software engineers means that (a) a few hundred thousand dollars is enough to dazzle them, and (b) their fans are technically-engaged enough to be able to figure out how to buy cryptocurrency

The people who pay into this are either taken in by the pretense that they’re sponsoring open-source work (in a way orders of magnitude less efficient than just donating money directly), or by the hope that they’re going to win big when the coin goes “to the moon” (which effectively never happens).

The celebrities will make a little bit of money, for their part in it, but the lion’s share of the reward will go to the actual grifters: the insiders who primed the coin and can sell off into the flood of community members who are convinced to buy.

this post got some comments on Hacker News. Commenters are a bit divided on whether the open-source developers are victims or perpetrators of the scam (I personally think it’s case-by-case).