9.5M Robinhood users traded cryptocurrencies in the first quarter
markets.businessinsider.com
markets.businessinsider.com
I don't even know if there are any actual underlying coins at all anywhere in the system. For smaller coins in particular, does this mean that in theory there could be more coins traded than existing supply?
Without transferring in or out, RobinHood encourages pure speculation and doesn't allow the investors to even try and pay for something in crypto even for the fun of it.
Crypto would have never reached to where it is today if all the exchanges where like RobinHood. A big part of why crypto succeeded early on was The Silk Road (check the billions in traded and seized assets) and all of its descendants (dark.fail).
Sadly, WA and NY started cracking down on having real crypto and many exchanges (looking at you, Kraken and LocalBitcoins) are turning into the RH model.
There's still no evidence of any value to cryptocoins.
The only "benefit" is allowing every transaction to be tracked.
Lookup how many millions seized from The Silk Road, Empire Market, Dark Market and the many millions in dollars seized from criminals each year by the FBI and foreign intelligence agencies.
You can check the new ones on (dark.fail) and you'll see there is more of them than ever, and with more offerings than ever. They all require your browser to have JavaScript disabled and use the Tor Browser, which has the highest security and privacy settings enabled.
Say whatever you want about cryptocurrency, but them having no value is the furthest thing from truth.
Just this year alone so far, Tesla started accepting BitCoin for buying its cars, together with PayPal too that lets you pay with crypto instead of a bank-issued card, effectively enabling BitCoin for millions of online (and offline) vendors who use PayPal.
The view that crypto is only speculation with no real-world value hasn't been true for many years for large segments of society.
In other countries, people put their money in crypto because obtaining hard currency in large amounts is very hard and their government has proven to be willing to outright stick its hand in their bank accounts and take however they want. You might not feel it in the Western World, but in many countries its very hard to obtain USD or EUR.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/everyth...
In a country like Venezuela, you don't have the choice to buy a foreign stable currency and at the same time the money vanishes due to inflation faster than you can get it because to take all its gold reserves from the USA and sell them in the open market.
https://nypost.com/2019/02/01/venezuelas-maduro-to-sell-gold...
This was from 2019. Look up yourself how much their currency has fallen since then after he followed up and started selling the gold.
He even created his own cryptocurrency to hide his own illegal drug sales!
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/petro-cryptocurrency.as...