Let’s be honest. You finally deployed your vibe-coded CRUD app, slapped Stripe on it, and spent three weeks designing subscription tiers named after celestial bodies like you’re some kind of SaaS Kepler. "But wait!" you cried into the void, "what if my TikTok viewers could resell my subscriptions like shady gas station vape cartridges?"

Buckle up, buttercup. I spent a weekend huffing the fumes of my own genius and accidentally built a transactable secondary market for digital subscriptions. No affiliate links. No "link in bio" bullshit. Just pure, unhinged cryptographic capitalism.

The repo’s here if you want to peer into the abyss: pill_generator. But let me walk you through this fever dream first.

The Affiliate Link Industrial Complex Is Holding You Hostage

You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. That creator with 2M followers posting "get 10% off with my code!" like they’re not just a flesh-based billboard for a product they barely understand. The whole dance is pathetic:

1. Sign up for affiliate program
2. Beg for a custom link
3. Spam it everywhere
4. Make $0.30 per conversion
5. Die inside

But what if—what if—OpenAI could mint 1,000 subscription "pills" for $100, sell them to creators at wholesale, and let those creators become actual resellers? Your favorite coding streamer could sell you a single GPT-4 pill for $0.15 directly, no Stripe integration required. They markup, they keep the profit, and OpenAI gets distribution through a thousand micro-merchants instead of one corporate sales team.

We’re not building a subscription system. We’re building the digital equivalent of a Shenzhen electronics market, but for API calls.

The Architecture: Because Security Through Obscurity Was Too Mainstream

Look, I’m not a security researcher. I’m a man with a weekend, a case of energy drinks, and a dangerous amount of hubris. But even I know you can’t just hand out coupon codes and pray. So I stole some ideas from Bitcoin, slapped them together with duct tape, and called it "Cryptographic Entitlement and Distributed Consensus."

Translation: I made it impossible to cheat, and I can prove it with math.

Two Domains, Zero Trust, One Hangover

The whole thing runs on a principle I call "Security Through Domain Separation" because it sounds cool at parties. I split the system into two halves that hate each other:

• The Factory (Issuance Domain): Where pills are born. Has a private key. Lives in a basement. Never sees the light of day.
• The Truth Engine (Subscription Domain): Where pills go to die. Has the public key. Handles the chaos. Prevents double-spending.

Here’s the breakdown:

Attribute	The Factory	The Truth Engine
Job	Makes signed pills	Kills used pills
Key Access	Private (signing)	Public (verification)
Logic	"Make thing go brrr"	"NO, YOU CAN’T USE THAT TWICE"
Persistence	PostgreSQL (for UX fluff)	etcd (the immutable graveyard)

The Shadow DB is just there so resellers can see their potential inventory without bothering the security core. It’s like a warehouse inventory app that can’t actually open the doors.

The Pills Themselves: Self-Contained Debt Instruments

Each pill is a tiny cryptographically-signed promise. I used Ed25519 because it’s fast and makes me feel smart. The structure is dead simple:

Base64(Payload).Hex(Signature)

The payload is just JSON with three fields:

{
"v": 1,           // Version (for when I inevitably break everything)
"pid": "CREATOR-BATCH-001",  // Pill ID
"iat": 1737400000 // Issued at timestamp
}

The security guarantee: Without the Factory’s private key, you cannot forge a pill. It’s mathematically impossible. Not "very hard"—impossible. You’d have better luck teaching a blockchain bro about database foreign keys.

The Graveyard Pattern: Killing Pills With Consensus

Here’s where it gets spicy. The double-spend problem is real. If I give you a pill, you could just copy-paste that string and use it a thousand times. Traditional systems solve this with a centralized database and a prayer.

I solved it with a 3-node etcd cluster and pure, uncut spite.

When you "burn" a pill (redeem it), the Gateway does an atomic compare-and-swap:

Txn().If(KeyExists(ID)).Then(Reject).Else(Put(ID))

This is Raft consensus, baby. Linearizable writes. The strongest consistency model known to backend engineers who’ve had too much coffee. It means you cannot write the same pill ID twice. Not "it’s unlikely"—you can’t. The physics of distributed systems prevents it.

The etcd store starts empty (default-deny) and only accumulates the IDs of dead pills. It’s a graveyard. Each new pill starts in purgatory and gets buried forever on first use. No resurrections. No mercy.

Stateless Authorization: Because Databases Are The Bottleneck Of My Soul

Once your pill is successfully burned, the Gateway issues a short-lived JWT. Downstream services don’t need to know about subscriptions, pills, or your tragic backstory. They just validate the JWT signature. That’s it.

Performance guarantee: Database latency = 0ms.

Your microservices become user-agnostic, DB-agnostic, and approximately 4,000% more smug. They just verify cryptographic signatures and serve requests. No network calls. No user tables. No context.

The Use Case: From Theory to TikTok Grift

Let’s paint the picture:

OpenAI mints 1,000 GPT-4 pills (each good for 10,000 tokens) and sells them to creators in bulk: $0.10 per pill.

@CodeWithSteve, your favorite neon-haired dev influencer, buys 100 pills. During his livestream, someone asks about his debugging workflow. Steve says, "I’ll sell you a GPT-4 pill for $0.20—it’ll analyze your entire codebase." The viewer DM’s him, pays via Venmo, Steve pastes them a pill string from his inventory.

The viewer burns the pill on OpenAI’s Gateway, gets a JWT, and uses GPT-4. The pill is now dead. Steve made $0.10 profit. OpenAI got distribution. The viewer got instant value. Nobody had to click an affiliate link. Nobody had to wait for Stripe verification. Nobody had to sell their email to a marketing funnel.

Multiply this by 10,000 creators. That’s a secondary market for digital subscriptions, and you’re the exchange.

The Grift Is The Feature

Look, I’m not saying this is legal. I’m not saying it’s ethical. I’m saying it’s inevitable.

The paper I wrote (yes, I wrote a fucking academic paper for my weekend project, don’t @ me) calls this "Cryptographic Entitlement and Distributed Consensus." But really? It’s just digital dropshipping with better math.

Your unhinged Jimmy Neutron brain-blast is the same as mine: what if we made subscriptions into bearer assets? What if we gave creators actual ownership instead of affiliate breadcrumbs? What if we turned every streamer, YouTuber, and TikToker into a micro-SaaS reseller?

The guarantees are real:

• Forgery prevention: Ed25519 signatures. Math says no.
• Anti-double-spend: Raft consensus. Physics says no.
• Scalability: Stateless auth. Performance says yes.
• Decentralized distribution: Every creator becomes a sales channel.

The Repo: Go Forth And Sin

The code is on GitHub. It’s Python, FastAPI, gRPC, and enough etcd to make a DevOps engineer weep with joy. It works. I’ve tested it. I’ve double-spent and gotten rejected. I’ve forged pills and gotten laughed at by the cryptography. It’s production-ready if your production is a chaotic neutral side hustle.

docker-compose up --build

Then start minting pills like you’re running a digital pill mill. Which, technically, you are.

TL;DR: Your New Business Model

You wanted to 10x your productivity? I 10x’d the subscription model itself. No more affiliate links. No more "link in bio." Just cryptographic pills, creator economies, and a secondary market for digital access that would make a Wall Street quant blush.

The elephant in the room isn’t that we’re building better subscription systems. It’s that we’re building systems that make subscriptions liquid.

And if that doesn’t make you feel like a chaotic good gremlin, I don’t know what will.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go explain to my therapist why I spent a weekend building a distributed consensus mechanism for selling API calls to TikTok teens.

P.S. OpenAI, if you’re reading this: call me. I’ve got a business model for you. It involves minting pills and giving creators actual skin in the game. Or don’t, and I’ll just build it myself. I’ve got weekends for days.