There is no doubt that the markets resemble a casino, and the house always takes more than it gives. But unlike a casino there are a lot of cogs in the wheel that the casino doesn't own, and much of what happened with Robinhood is because of the inefficiency of the cogs, financialization, and the great western USD hegemony (more on that below). The worst case scenario is Robinhood going insolvent and taking all the shares of the clients assets (shares/cash) they have in custody. That was a very real possibility, and there would have been nothing illegal about it. Every Robinhood customer would have nothing but an IOU and the courts to go after their assets as the company wound its way through bankruptcy. Robinhood did what they had to do to survive something they didn't foresee was ever a possibility. GO WSB!!! But the users all signed up for Robinhood knowing that if something is free then they are the product. No fee trading, awesome, but Robinhood isn't actually like Robinhood of old. It isn't a charity, its a well marketed data gathering entity that sells its "stock flow" information to someone else, who then uses that in ways that could fill a lot of blogs…. I have learnt more about the inner workings of this casino in the last week than in decades. For that I can only thank the WSB peeps that sacrificed their $ and are going to be left holding the bag.

So, that whole USD hegemony thing. We have crony capitalism, corporate welfare, inside deals, etc. etc. The system is the absolute worst….except for all the others. For the life of me I cannot imagine what replaces the USD global hegemony that would be better. But hey, I am irresponsibly long in crypto……