Arthur Crowson

@hosseeb Great post. Real question: is there a way to short crypto gaming? It's one of the worst market fits I've ever seen and proven time and time again to be something absolutely no one wants.

With all due respect to Chris, I completely disagree with this take. Chris argues that "web3," particularly crypto-powered gaming and media, failed due to scams and regulation, and that better regulation will unlock these non-financial cases. OK, think about this for a second. Does this pass the smell test? Do you think web3 gaming failed because of Gary Gensler? Do you think web3 media plays failed because the scammers crowded out the honest media innovators? Really? If this is true, why didn't they kill financial crypto, which had WAY more of both? Financial use cases were right in the crosshairs of the regulatory harassment, and they also attracted way more scams. Why shouldn't we instead accept the more obvious answer: non-financial use cases for crypto have failed because no one wants them. Let's just admit it. They were bad products. They failed the market test. It was not Gensler or SBF or Terra that caused these things to fail, it was that no one wanted any of it. Pretending otherwise is cope. Enormous sums of capital and talent explored these ideas, and we should acknowledge what we learned. That lesson is not "if we just had better laws, then finally people would finally be using decentralized Spotify" or whatever. Call a spade a spade. Every single use case in crypto that has worked at scale has been financial in nature. 2008: Bitcoin - non-sovereign store of value 2014: Tether - stablecoins 2015: Ethereum - programmable money 2017: ICOs - capital formation 2018: Prediction markets (Augur, later Polymarket) 2020: DeFi - literally finance is in the name 2021: NFTs - non-fungible financial assets (to the extent they worked) 2024: RWAs (the year BUIDL took off) All this stuff was adopted bottoms-up. We as investors discovered that people wanted to do these things with crypto. The web3 consumer stuff, on the other hand, was primarily conjured up by investors and pitch decks, ZIRP accelerationism, and "wouldn't it be crazy if" blog posts. This was the opposite of the "what smart people are doing on their weekends" thesis. In fact, if you go back to the Ethereum white paper from 2014, almost every single Ethereum use case Vitalik describes is financial in nature: token issuance, stablecoins, derivatives, on-chain treasuries/DAOs, on-chain savings, insurance, price feeds, escrow, gambling, prediction markets. It's all in there. This is nothing to be ashamed of. Finance is almost 10% of GDP. It's an enormous part of the world economy, and banks are some of the lowest NPS score companies in the world. People hate their banks and the outdated financial architectures their money runs on. It's literally why Bitcoin was created. There is so much to innovate in the realm of finance, and I truly believe we are only at the beginning of that displacement. You don't need to assume anything more to project the next 10x in crypto. The old saying goes "crypto will do to finance what the Internet did to every other industry." I respect Chris's optimism. But 18 years in, we should not be propagating this meme about consumer web3 use cases as though they're inevitable. If you are hanging around the rim hoping that crypto is going to disrupt media and gaming, you should know the history and look at it with clear eyes. Now if you as a founder believe that despite that, you know the secret to cracking this market--I respect that, and I certainly don't begrudge anyone to follow their convictions. But I think it's important that investors be honest that all the evidence points the other way.

Google was the latest entity to test out large language models (LLMs) via a poker contest. OpenAI dominated the first trial, matching prior experiments:

@ThomasDrance @RachelKryshak I've always been a fan of the Gold plan but I had a thought this year: Would it completely crush trade deadline as very few teams would be looking to sell?

@RachelKryshak I am a fan

Every league should be actively engaged in trying to solve for the fact that the current structure of the draft, across all 4 major North American sports leagues but especially the NFL, NHL and NBA, incentivizes engaged fans to root for losses down the stretch of losing seasons.

@ThomasDrance @vancanuckpain I'm curious if the Aves are a good example for the Canucks to follow. Restart the rebuild, essentially. Matt Duchene = Hughes etc. Worked out pretty well for the Aves.

@vancanuckpain Yeah, the Sakic era was granted the benefit of a false start (Sakic had the opportunity to learn, which Linden didn’t get basically). Kings messed it up on the back-end but became a consistent playoff team at least. Sharks are going to get there, that’s locked in now.

You can do this with the Sharks, Kings and Avalanche too before the #Canucks return home. Rebuilding works, don’t let the head-in-the-sand crowd lie to you and pretend otherwise.

@ThomasDrance You've said it many times over the years but this team just feels like if everything goes right, it might make the playoffs What a terrible ceiling.

It’s harder to sell the “rebuilds don’t work” line in an NHL where virtually all of the recent rebuilding teams are progressing, and all of the stubborn striver class teams are at the bottom of the standings. Buffalo is the only enduring gift to the congenitally impatient.

@pokerscoutcom Why the small sample size??

The LLM poker contest wrapped up last week, won by OpenAI's ChatGPT, in line with PokerScout's observation of the various bots' poker abilities. Meta's Llama 4 seemed to be the whale at the table, burning through 50 buy-ins in under 5000 hands. Sample size is an issue, however.

We interviewed the director of the new poker movie "Down to the Felt." He discussed his own poker background, the making of the film, and why it ends the way it does (spoilers at the bottom!)

Underground poker in New York City is easy to find, but are the games worth it? Our reporter, Mo (@monuwwarah), made the trip so you don't have to, and gives the experience two thumbs down. Exorbitant rake and not allowed to walk away while ahead? At least there was pizza.

@ThomasDrance Preach

Do you fully understand that there is only one defender in the NHL who manipulates play in this manner, or do you go to sleep at 10:30 ET every night?

@CanucksArmy Mancini > Willander

What is your spiciest #Canucks take heading into the 25-26 season?

@HIElectricLight No power in North Kohala as of 6am, Wednesday.

@davidtsocy @baseapp Yessir

Who needs a @baseapp invite? Reply below

@JCKHLRY Yep

I have invite codes for Comet. ☄️ Comment below if you want one.

@TheStanchion Hell yeah! Really hoping the site gets some sort of upgrade on the backend. Crashes more than any other single website I've ever used in my life. Amazing content, obv.

Just confirming I’m back at Canucks Army again next season! Really excited about what we’re planning for the Stanchies, also gonna do more video work, and I’m just very thankful for the people who read and support us. AI ain’t got nothing on us!

@cburniske I think about this a lot. I think Phantom is a big part of the reason SOL has grown like it has over the last five years. But on the other hand Keplr on Cosmos is great and hasn't really moved the needle.

Poor wallet UX is one of the silent inhibitors for many L1 ecosystems. Protocol teams can turn it around, but they need to make it a focus, be it through direct engineering or nurturing great teams to build world-class wallets.

@VerlonMundall I think the argument is that a good deal of the Abby Canucks were older AHL lifers. And even the prospects seem more like middle of the lineup players. Who knows though. 31 seems kinda low.

I am trying to understand this considering the Abbotsford Canucks recent win @arthurcrowson

@Hockey_Robinson Cam, why you gotta be so mean?

In 2026-27, Vancouver will be paying Demko, Garland, and Lankinen a combined ~20M Florida will be paying Tkachuk, Ekblad and Marchand the same.

@mvanhemmen @Matt_MacInnis Yep. I was gonna say this. They botched it twice. Management has a bad habit of destroying the value of their own assets sometimes.

@Matt_MacInnis Or at a minimum sell on it when you know you’re missing the playoffs that year and you don’t think he’s that player

I will forever contend the #Canucks botched Kuzmenko. I dont care how over-heated a 39 goal season is, you should be able to use that talent.

@KyleReidhead Is SKY available to people in the US? Or just some features like staking not allowed? You're really selling me on it :P

Imagine... Just for 1 SECOND A crypto protocol that ACTUALLY generates profit Like, let's say, $117 MILLION annualized And then uses said profits to buy MILLIONS of its token everyday AND gives a % of said profits to its token holders Now Imagine that company was STILL valued at less than $2 Billion Man, imagine what kind of opportunity that would be...

@cburniske Just a heads-up, noticed a copycat account of yours trying to follow me > x.com/cburnisjke