The people have been put in their place by the ‘simple’ act of a centralized app abusing its trust to go against all written and unwritten contractual agreements with its customers.
Rising on the back of century old memes by evoking the tale of Robinhood, the masses came to play with the tune of rightousness.
Naked short selling is illegal. Coopted SEC does nothing about it nor any agency of the government, but the people generally do not like cheating, certainly not when it comes at the expense of 40,000 GameStop employees that were being driven to bankruptcy.
It doesn’t stop there. To Wall Street and TV media, things like Blackberry or Nokia are dead. Of the past. Buy Apple or Microsoft their endless chorus instead, despite these companies surpassing 2 trillion, in combination accounting for some 30% of EU’s GDP.
Yet Blackberry has been innovating, announcing a deal with Amazon Web Services to jointly develop and market a product called Ivy – a cloud-connected platform that lets auto makers read and analyze data from sensors in vehicles.
Nokia, which brings memories of them old phones, is now instead a potential pioneer in 5G.
Their revenue is astounding, $25 billion, and they actually make quite a bit of profit. They laying infrastructure for terabytes bandwidth. Terabytes!
Robinhood however has decided to stop the ability to buy NOK, allowing only selling. Why? Because people have been buying it as its market cap is just 1x its revenue, compared to Apple’s 32x.
It is a curious development that in many ways reflects CCP’s tactics of censorship and control. Not that the latter belongs to any country or governance system when the only real governance today is oligarchy, rule by the billionaires and only for the billionaires.
So that an app like Robinhood would follow orders is a new revelation because centralized service providers are now declaring they’ll act against the people not just where it concerns free speech, but also in financial matters.
In some ways that should make this space feel vindicated because it was being ridiculed for creating its own game instead of checkmating them at their own game.
It is unclear whether the latter is possible because you can’t win in a game where they set the rules and can change them as they please.
Sure, you can go to your bought for ‘representatives’ in Congress, but they’re probably as worried by this empowerment of the people as the billionaires that pay them.
You can only win by changing the game. You don’t argue that the Fed shouldn’t have the ability to rig all things by creating money from nothing, you instead create the conditions where they can’t do so at least where your own environment is concerned, in this case bitcoin.
Likewise you can’t really force Robinhood to do anything, especially in an oligarchy. All you can do is create the conditions where Robinhood can’t do anything.
As it happens this is somewhat illegal in as far as one has to be a registered broker to custody stocks which are then tokenized in a tether manner after which they can roam the free space of smart contract based dapps running on ethereum.
You could of course try to do this fully legally by going through all the SEC denials and years of attempts to get approval.
Or some real Robinhood could arise and launch it Nakamoto style to truly empower the people by enshrining the rules in unchangeable code.
So yes, the counter-revolution will probably win in this specific case to the devastation of three million retail investors that were just discovering how they can participate in the economy.
But it will be a Pyrrhic victory for it will guide the people to the real empowering tools that level the field between customer and service provider and like the monarchies of the past reduce them to the accountability of the people.
