Chris Dixon has a new book out about Crypto called Read, Write, Own.

I hear that one of the frames from the book is crypto-as-casino vs crypto-as-computer.

He asserts, as I think many people would, that they care about crypto-as-computer but don't care at all for crypto-as-casino.

I wonder if they're actually separable, though.

Crypto, in some ways, is the hardest possible environment to do platform design.

Maximal decentralization means maximal coordination costs.

The fact everything is directly financialized means any zero-day could drain billions of dollars in the blink of an eye.

It all adds up to massive headwinds that have to be overcome.

The casino part is what makes it worth the while for the vast majority of entities that invest time and effort in crypto.

So saying 'I want crypto without the casino' is hard for me to imagine, because the casino is the only reason crypto works at all!

This is not a dynamic unique to crypto, by the way.

I think you could reasonably frame all of Silicon Valley as a "computer" (sifting through a large number of bad ideas to find the small number of great ones) and a casino (massive paydays for the early investors in the ideas that turn out to be great).

One of the only ways to quickly find game-changing ideas is to have a system with a lot of variance (which implies, inevitably, a lot of crappy ideas), combined with over-the-top lottery style dynamics for finding the winners early.