Robinhood App Is Not Free / Brave Rewards Almost Here

Published in

The Cryptoverse

4 min readSep 30, 2018

On Today’s Episode of The Cryptoverse…

Coming at you again today in radio format because looking at the stats it doesn’t seem to make a difference yet the amount of work to produce an episode in this format is significantly less.

Add to that, the fact that I’m working through another intense phase of my meditation program and you end up with today’s episode.

At the end of the day it’s the content that matters so let’s get into some news.

Episode Transcript & Notes

Completely Overhauled Version Of Brave Browser Moves Into Beta:

https://brave.com/brave-beta-release/

I mentioned this developer version of Brave was available a week or so ago, well now it’s moved into full beta.

I’ve been testing it and it’s a huge improvement on the previous version and is becoming almost indistinguishable from Chrome, making the switching cost less and less.

The one feature everyone seems to be waiting for which is Brave rewards, which makes a payment to you whenever an ad appears is now closer than ever with this release because it even includes a test version of the feature.

The Brave project continues to be in the top 5 crypto projects of all time in my opinion because it’s genuinely useful, solves a huge problem and has been relentlessly marching forward with development since it’s ICO.

What more could you ask for?

Sponsorship Slot — Weiss Cryptocurrency Ratings

One thing you could ask for is an ongoing stream of research from a smart guy who gives you trade recommendations.

https://weisscryptocurrencyratings.com/

That guy would be Juan Vilaverde who is the brains behind Weiss Cryptocurrency Ratings, who recently caught the XRP pump and dump.

Here’s the intro from Juan’s newsletter from the 20th of September recommending a purchase of XRP:

https://wcp.weissratings.com/why-the-recent-battering-of-ethereum-is-good-news-for-crypto-markets-225525

And here’s the flash alert the next day recommending a sell of XRP, after it doubled:

https://wcp.weissratings.com/flash-alert-sell-the-xrp-you-bought-yesterday-225546

So check out this service for yourself and if you sign up through my link that will help support the channel and most likely improve your crypto portfolio results.

And if you hate ads and those sponsor spots you can now remove them by signing up to our Patreon which is also linked on the website TheCryptoverse.show

Let’s Continue The Show!

Robinhood Investing App Secretly Makes Millions Selling Millennials’ User Data To HFT Firms

This next story will include me getting on my high horse so trigger warning in advance. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

So, the Robinhood stock trading app has succeeded largely based on it’s market message of offering the ability to buy stocks without a fee.

It seems Millennials in particular are the most gullible because they subsequently flocked to the app with little awareness at all.

Why did no one teach these kids the simple axiom that there is no such thing as a free lunch? Probably because that’s from a time when meeting a sales person, in person was the normal.

These days the axiom is “if the service is free then you are the product.”

That today means your user data. If you’re not prepared to pay for something that’s fine, but you’re going to pay some other way, and not in a way you might choose, evidenced by Robinhood selling trade data to high frequency trading firms.

That allows the trading firms to get information about what Robinhood users are going to buy, slightly ahead of those orders being executed so the traders can get in front of it and scalp some profit.

Each user on each trade may only pay a slight fraction more for the stock as a result, but at scale a high frequency trading firm can make a nice big steady income.

I say the users lack awareness but maybe they don’t. Maybe they are perfectly fine to pay for this service in this way, as long as they are aware of what is happening and consciously accept the model.

In reality they probably just scroll to the bottom of the terms of service and click accept.

It may not cost you individually very much, but on a systemic level as it says in the opening line of this article here you are complicit in empowering a system that “steals from Robinhood users to give to the rich.”

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