I made $9000 and complained about it
Last week I made my monthly salary in four hours, doing what I love, through a method I was long denouncing. Here's the story.
The first time I got to engage with crypto was when I was 12yo. I bought bitcoin, then sold it, then bought again, then sold again, and in about a week I have lost the ability to buy or sell bitcoin, because I’ve wasted all my cash for transaction fees.
Then, my next interaction with crypto was when I was 22yo and attended a crypto hackathon for a company that claimed revolutionary network tech, which I used (it was not revolutionary) to build a simple Minecraft load-balancing with a friend, which ended up winning us $25k in ETH.
Through the years, I have acquired this strong distaste for crypto because all I could see online was hacks, scams, and I honestly hated the fact I was constantly tagged in bot posts going “claim your drop”, which would most certainly try to crack a wallet of mine. Last week this distaste lowered, and with it, a surge of complicated thoughts flooded my brain.
This is a story of how I made $9000 doing what I love, through a method I was long denouncing.
Job, free-time, and side-projects
I am working as a staff engineer at one company, and as a software architect in another. I’ve been in tech for the past 7 years. What I’ve been struggling with for the past two years, is that I feel dissatisfied with my job. Specifically, being the strictly technical person that I was for the past 7 years. LLMs made it increasingly hard for me to feel happy doing technical stuff, as my main motivation in being a good specialist, was to feel special. I dropped out of university and started as a systems administrator, then went into DevOps, and became a senior in ~2.5 years. This made me feel special on two vectors: First, I reached my local salary cap by the time my university friends were in their third year. And second: I was a very good platform engineer who could also write decent frontend, and create full-stack applications. I was thriving.
About 4 years into my career, ChatGPT dropped, and with it Anthropic’s Claude, and the models just became better and better. At the beginning I was still feeling special, but by the time the terminal agents dropped, my entire purpose vanished. Everyone could do what I’ve been doing my best to learn how to do, in a prompt. Me included.
So there I stand, purposeless, doing side-project after side-project, and then it clicked. “Hey, the only thing that fascinates me right now are terminal agents lol”. But I felt this strange imposter syndrome, that if I don’t understand AI/ML, I am not going to be able to do anything good / interesting. This feeling faded when I recently thought about Boris Cherny (the creator of Claude Code), who is practically a software engineer, not an AI researcher. This guy singlehandedly changed the direction of tech with an internal-to-Anthropic side-project. This gave me hope, and made me understand that as long as you believe in what you do, have fun, and do it through sheer authenticity, you are ALLOWED to do whatever you want. And so I started working on a side-project that actually makes me feel high emotions.
Clopus: Initial stream, 01, 02
During my last year’s December paid leave, I was able to focus on what I want and that ended up with me creating an autonomous Claude Code which I called Clopus. The very first event was just a website that would stream the Claude Code tmux pane, as well as the website it created + its projects. I wrote more about this: here. The results this project gave me were: 646k impressions on X, 60k unique users in the CF dashboard, and a lot of attention. Which felt good, considering how much I was enjoying it. You can also see the live event artifacts here: link.
After realizing just how much I enjoyed doing this, I doubled down on this feeling and went further, achieving a fully-autonomous, forever-running Claude Code through a systemd timed service & tmux. I wrote about it here: link. This time I didn’t stream it publicly, but instead observed on my own, and ultimately started this blog. The post generated $180 in paid subscriptions. One more strong confirmation that doing what I feel the strongest, authentically, results in positive reinforcement.
After that, with the newly acquired knowledge I have about Claude Code’s capabilities, I created an SRE autonomous twin, and put it inside k8s to monitor a namespace. It succeeded, and since then, three companies are actively using it. The project I called “clopus-watcher” and it acquired 260 stars on Github and 35 forks. I wrote about it: here. Not only that, but numerous people contacted me, and I got to talk with a few startups. Once again… positive reinforcement.
The fourth project I created came from me applying my GitOps knowledge and creating a fully-functional self-hosted v0/replit that would allow me to program a project entirely and only through github issue, by tagging “clopus”. It worked perfectly. I wrote about it: here (step-1) & here (step-2).
The fifth project… well, this is when things got crazy.
$8000 in 4 hours vs $9600 in 30 days
A few days ago I decided to run another autonomous Claude Code stream, where this time my intention was to give it access to Chrome and solve the auto-approval limitations of ‘claude . —chrome’. And I did. I solved them through yet another systemd timer that would, yet again interact with the tmux pane of the worker claude. I put out a post on Twitter, and closed the app.
Coming back in 15 minutes, I noticed 20+ replies from anonymous profile pictures, but ones that were related to the crypto community. “Oh, no…”, I thought. I am being swarmed. Overwhelmed by this event, I deleted the original post and expressed my disliking to this, while also sharing just how interesting this run is going. And then I saw a reply: “we are not bots, you idiot… you tech bros are literally reta*ded… you have free money and you don’t want it”. This made me think… “What if he’s right”? I opened my DMs and there was this guy texting me a wall of curses and I noticed that it looks as if it’s written by a real person; not a bot. I decided to engage. I asked him to explain.
What this person explained to me, was new to me: “Someone creates a coin for your project, and all the fees go to you. There are fees that traders pay when they want to buy / sell a supply of any coin, so in this particular website, all the fees go to you. You have $4000 to claim.”. Huh… $4000? I decided to open the website, authenticate with my X/Twitter account and well.. I really did have $4000 to claim. And so I did. And that’s when my moral compass started ticking.. east, west, east, west, north, south, north south… I was being blasted with thoughts and emotions. “I just claimed $4000..?! What the hell?? Surely this is a scam…”. And it wasn’t. I was successfully able to claim and withdraw my funds.
The app in question is bags.fm
And then this person told me to create a community & a coin. That’s when I drew back.
Thinking about the $4k I got in those 3 hours, I couldn’t help but think how I am doing my best to apply my in-depth knowledge of platform engineering at my job, to work 20 days * 7 hours, for which I am billing $70/h. That’s 140-hours for 9800 usd. And I made $4k in 3-hours. (not long after, I made $9k..)
This is not the first time I am interacting with memecoins. I have observed numerous creators launching a coin, then dumping it, which I always looked upon with extreme disgust. All I can think about in this regard, is people losing their savings & having their lives very negatively impacted. That’s why I was so reluctant in the first place. I started sending out posts explaining that I would not post a CA, that I would not create a community, and I wouldn’t want anyone to buy the coin to “support me”, if they do it for the support. I got numerous negative replies like: “we gave you $4k and you hate us.. why won’t you just get your money.. why won’t you post”, which only confirmed my disliking. It felt like I was being pushed to hype the coin so that those people can make profits at the expense of normal people genuinely believing they could support me or make money. I did my best to reply to most of the replies that indicated someone would by the coin.
Thinking about it, however, I came to realize: the crypto community wants to buy their coins. This is what they do.. it is “PVP”, as they call it. They have automated systems, and most of them know what they’re doing. They certainly know what they are signing up for. Then.. “Why can’t we co-exist?”, I thought. Why can’t I keep making money off fees, doing what I love, and they do.. um.. whatever they are doing? And now I think we can. But the line is very thin. And it requires work.
Coming to think of it, I don’t think being aggressive towards the crypto community is a necessarily the right thing to do. If they know what they are doing & they are fully aware of the risks — which they are — then why do I judge them? Does anyone judge me when I smoke cigars or order KFC? Sure.. but am I doing in through my own personal free will? Yes. How is it any different, then?
What I think is very important, is that a strong vocal notification about the risks is required. This is especially important in order to not get “casualties” in the form of normal, non-crypto people, who would see all of this and think, “I’ll support him!”, or “I’ll make money!”. For me it is very important to not have any casualties that I am responsible for. I do not want a single non-crypto person to lose their money because of what I do. This is also why I was so negative in the beginning.
And while I could’ve made $40k, looking at the trend, possibly even more, I decided to not risk it. However, I now observe multiple creators going “full in” on the ride without taking precautions to preserve the unaware.
Crypto & #buildinpublic
After my experience, I have now observed two other “normies” (like me) becoming a catalyst for the crypto community. This is particularly interesting, because this was previously (as in my case) not well-looked upon, and whenever a “normie” heard the word “coin”, they’d run away as far as they could. Bags.fm changed this.
The way the Bags team made their UI/UX, and the docs suggesting that the fees is what generates the compensation for creators + their docs, make up for a very believable foundation. I think this is what made this tech/bip+crypto merge happen. And now that I’ve been looking into how SOL fees work, I understand the model, and I truly believe it can work. However… the devil is in the details.
Most of the coins created on bags (just like in pump.fun), are created by individuals on the SOL chain. The nature of shitcoins / memecoins, is that they are created with the intention to initiate a p&d (pump and dump). This means that the coins generating fees for creators have the majority of supply owned by a single individual / group. This means that this coin can be dumped at any time when there are enough profits for the individual / group to initiate the dump. This is VERY IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT IN CRYPTO.
If you are a creator who benefits from/is involved with crypto in one way or another, make sure to be very transparent about how the coins you are making commissions from work!
The creators I observe on Twitter/X are not at all vocal enough about how this works to their non-crypto community. This is wrong and irresponsible.
To prevent p&d’s, the possible solution would be to create your own coin and own the majority of the supply. This is tricky, though, because the creator will then have to manage their coin and access to it i.e. be skilled enough to not get hacked and ultimately triggering a p&d. In my own opinion, the creator should also not create a community around their work, because this would pretty much do their entire job hyping the coin and generating more commissions. I think the commissions should be a cause of their work, not the main target to chase.
To recap: Is it a good model? Yes. Is it immoral to participate in this: it depends on how you handle it, and what your methods of participating are.
Closing notes
I worked on something I find interesting. This resulted in positive reinforcement events for me. It allowed me to talk to startups & discuss my work, for companies to use one of my OSS projects. I even have a call this week for a job in San Francisco. Which, if you are living outside the US, would agree with me is a great opportunity to experience the very part of the internet that we are on 24/7, in real life.
Not only that, but I made my entire main-job salary in 4-hours. Which, yes, I complained about. And while, yes, I do think it is ungrateful to do so, I also believe I am in my right to be complaining, to be vocal about the dangers of participating in crypto as a “normie”. As I explained, I do not want any “normie casualties” to happen because of my actions. And for this reason, I will also not be creating a community around my work; this would make my primary focus to hype a coin, and for its price to go up.
I do think, however, that this model is good and it can enable people (any type of people) to do what they want. But for this to work, the creators need to be very transparent about what is happening, and definitely not change their PFP and start posting the starship /moon emoji on every post they put on their name.
It is a hard balance to achieve, but with enough internal retrospection from creators’ side, and a stable mindset, I believe the two communities can co-exist.
Thank you for reading & please be mindful of what you do on the internet.
— Dennis