Crypto grifters are recruiting open-source AI developers (opens in new tab)

I got bombarded this morning. I woke up and checked my X-account - which I've never tweeted from before (other than replies) - it was being tagged everywhere and I had a ton of messages. I was sent a link to Bags app. And there was some wallet with a decent amount of Solana attributed to my Twitter identity.

Not a single one of the people messaging me had actually used my open source repo.

> 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).

No everyone who's paying into this are either a blend of both or just the latter. No one is misguided into thinking this is a more efficient form of donating via crypto than just sending usdc to the recipient's address.

But it’s not “hundreds of thousands of dollars” is it? It’s meme-coins that are supposedly worth that much. Is there a to getting any significant amount of (real) money out of them?

> Some crypto trader created a “$GAS” coin via Bags, configuring it to pay a portion of the trading fees to Steve Yegge (via his Twitter account) That trader, or others with the same idea, messaged Yegge on LinkedIn to tell him about his “earnings” (currently $238,000), framing it as support for the Gas Town project. Yegge took the free money and started posting about how exciting $GAS is as a way to fund open-source software creators

hey guys, this is what always happens when someone you respect "rugs" their token and none of their apologies sound genuine

in fact, they actually are also the victims and the real culprits (the token creators DMing popular people) are never held to account

there should be more knowledge of this so people feel deterred and also more likely to avoid these or bring the roving bands of scammers to account

and sure, still hold your community leader accountable in some way, but the proper way more in line with reality

these roving bands of token scammers look for people experiencing 15 minutes of fame, and take advantage of them

It is pretty disappointing to see legitimate engineers getting mixed up in these crypto schemes just because the money is there. The article makes a good point that buying the coin does literally nothing for the software itself, so it is basically just gambling. I guess this is just the newest way to grift off the hype around AI development.

Crypto is a PVP zone.

Everyone is aware that investing in crypto is risky. Especially recently established meme coins with no functional innovation whose principal distinction is celebrity endorsement.

I find it puzzling that intellectually serious people on a startup-adjacent website are morally outraged by the existence of winners and losers in a blatantly capitalistic, market-driven ecosystem.

The River [1] consists of people who are attracted to risk and opportunity. They thrive in high-risk high-reward environments.

The Village consists of people who are attracted to safety and stability. They thrive in low-risk environments, which are also usually low-reward by nature.

It's a matter of individual taste. A functioning society benefits from both. And it's a not matter of rationality or EV. Riverians can irrationally choose to make -EV high-risk bets; Villagers can irrationally take costly precautions against remote risks.

Humans are contradictory; the same person who pays for insurance might also buy a lottery ticket. The same gamer who bemoans loot boxes ruining video games might also own a large collection of Magic: The Gathering cards.

The only explanation I can come up with is that Riverian playgrounds are morally offensive to some Village types.

Many people are outraged by crypto because it's not "safe". They're the people who decided the slides and the merry-go-rounds and the pirate ships and the jungle gyms needed to be downsized and padded and supervised and taken out, until all the fun is gone.

I'm continually surprised that a substantial portion of HN, normally a startup-adjacent tech-adjacent River-adjacent community, hates so hard on crypto.

[1] https://www.natesilver.net/p/welcome-to-the-river

> But Huntley and Yegge have also been posting about $RALPH and $GAS, which are cryptocurrency coins built on top of the longstanding Solana cryptocurrency

Solana isn't a cryptocurrency, it's a blockchain network (by some measures, the one with the most user activity). SOL is the native token of that network, used to pay transaction fees. These are two random tokens that happen to also use Solana.

They’re targeting game developers too. Source: me, a game dev

Started two weeks ago. Someone claimed people were pretending to trade coins related to my game. (Huh?)

Week later I was told I could make thousands of dollars. Today it was life changing money. Wanted me to promote it too.

If I may, who are the grifters here and who are the innocent parties? Why? Who does this harm?

On the one hand: It's nice that they're managing to transfer some of the crypto gambling proceeds into something that's not totally malevolent!

On the other hand: pretty gross that BAGS is tied into the 'We'll help you use AI to undress children' site formerly known as Twitter. This seems like a much better fit for Bluesky. These days imho it's an automatic 2.99 strikes against anyone who is still endorsing X with their continued business.