The Casino is Eating the Computer

Hello friends,

I've spent my career at the intersection of media & tech, watching the wave of streaming video build during the 2010's, then seeing that wave crash into another wave of everyone picking up their phones & starting their own media business.

As I was trying to start another business a couple years ago, I felt really stuck.

All the ideas felt the same: how can we use LLM's to turn some type of media into even more media. All the major social platforms were becoming more insular, more fortified walled gardens each day. Many of our smartest people were working on fine-tuning similar social feeds on different platforms, each one searching for some spark of network effects.

What made me excited about consumer crypto was the possibility of building a better internet, one with more interoperability, more distributed ownership, a better economy for all participants. Chris Dixon's book Read Write Own articulates this vision well - what he and others call the "Computer" vision of consumer crypto.

On the flip side, there's been a ton of effort aimed at building out the "Casino" vision of consumer crypto. And so far, this side has gained WAY more traction.

It's always important to understand why people are using or paying for your product. It should inform what you build, your marketing & growth strategy, and the long-term story you build around your company. Understanding your customers motivation can also help you gauge market sizing and whether you can build a viable business.

For the sake of this post, let's assume:

• "Casino" = the reason the user opens the app is >90% to speculate, gamble, and ultimately try to make money.
• "Computer" = any attempt at building better consumer apps, products, ecosystems, etc. using crypto rails, where the reason people use them is NOT to make money (or it's less than 10% of their motivation).

The Computer vision drew me in not for some moral reason, but more so because it seems like the bigger market opportunity.

Both my parents were stock brokers & I majored in Finance, learning about credit default swaps as the Great Financial Crisis raged on in the background. One early thing you learn about trading is the "vig": the built-in fee that a market maker charges for each transaction. For any ecosystem that encourages active trading, the vig bends things toward three likely outcomes:

1. Platforms are guaranteed to make a ton of money (which may attract competition).
2. A small group (10% of participants) will find unfair advantages and capture most of the economy (90% of the value).
3. Most people will gradually lose all their money over time if they continue to participate & trade.

This is why I'm allergic to Casino crypto apps: you can only lose money for so long before you churn out.

On the flip side, we see thriving economies on the internet, bolstered by non-speculative motivations, many of which we wrote about last year:

• patronage and wanting to support creative work so that it continue to exist & maybe even flourish
• expressing something about yourself & trying to find others that share in your interests
• a desire to learn, expand your professional network, access valuable insights, and become better in your line of work

These motivations feel more durable, less zero-sum. The promise of consumer crypto is that, with better underlying infrastructure, we could radically expand these existing economies and build a better internet.

Yet, while we've seen several "Casino" consumer crypto apps gain significant traction, we haven't really seen any "Computer" apps break out. This used to be because onboarding, commerce flows, and broader product ux was clunky compared to existing software products, but this has become much less true over the past year or so.

Who knows why the Computer is having a hard time competing with the Casino, but I'd throw out a few theories:

• Branding problem. People's general perception of crypto aligns more w/ Casino than Computer. If you're building a Computer product, at some point you have to explain what it does, and your target audience may be allergic to the pitch.
• Network effects are hard to overcome. Instagram, X, YouTube, etc. have incredibly strong network effects, with 90% of users stuck in habitual loops, just wanting to waste some time scrolling. Since the 1% who post are dependent on the 90%'s attention, it's really hard for them to move to a new platform (and convince their audience to come too).
• Crypto's primitives may be better suited for Casino products. It's possible the underlying technology is better suited to speculation and we shouldn't expect too many Computer apps built on crypto rails.
• Too much funding creating unrealistic expectations. Some Computer products may have actually gotten traction, just not the growth trajectory their funding requires. Many of these ideas might work better as sustainable niche products built by smaller teams with longer runways.

I have an enormous amount of respect & admiration for the teams that have really tried to fulfill the Computer vision: Mirror, Rodeo, Farcaster, just to name a few. These teams and many other operators, builders, and entrepreneurs have fought the inward pull toward the Casino, which is certainly hard when you're trying to build a business, watching explosive revenue growth from your Casino app peers.

It's pretty clear the Casino has won the early rounds, but I continue to think it's the smaller, less durable market opportunity.

What I'm hoping for is that the Computer vision finds its footing. Maybe that's a breakout app that reaches massive scale. Maybe it's a growing constellation of smaller, idiosyncratic products: each weird in its own way, built by small teams, serving specific communities, quietly interoperating beneath the surface.

Either path would be a win. What matters is that we don't let crypto fall inward toward the Casino. The Computer vision is too valuable to give up on.

Morning Dew

The Casino is Eating the Computer