Options very well can be down more than 100%. It's a leveraged bet and a very common vehicle in traditional finance. So much so you can buy/sell them on platforms like Robinhood.
Former options market maker here. Taking leveraged, directional risk with options is textbook reckless trading. That Robinhood found people to swing options and crypto is not representative of traditional finance.
What made Robinhood (originally) unique was stripping away those protections, or otherwise automating them away in a mobile app. We have lots of concrete examples of people losing their life's savings on Robinhood, in no small part because of how easy it made leveraging oneself.
Your knowledge around opening an options account is slightly outdated. They used to have net worth requirements and more legal forms. Some time around 2020 though at the beginning of the pandemic all of this was removed. It's a few clicks now at pretty much any major investment bank such as TD Ameritrade.
> This is not true. The riskiest stocks are down thousands of %.
I mean, sure looks like you were trying to argue that crypto isn't performing worse than the riskiest decile of the stock market, which just isn't true at all.
The iShares Small Cap Growth ETF (which is a probably a decent proxy for the most volatile companies in the market) is only down 13% on the year.
The only commonly traded way to lose more than you started with are futures (not available on most retail platforms) and CFDs (not legal in many markets, including the USA).
"The riskiest stocks are down thousands of %" is untrue regardless of whether that position was in regular shares or /r/WSB style 10,000 calls expiring Friday.