Robinhood Launches Crypto, but Education is at an All-Time Low

This past week, Robinhood announced that it was launching crypto trading in my state. Cool, I bought a bit of bitcoin to support the cause, even if there is no wallet interface (yet).

The interesting addition is the troll box style chat available for each coin. There are clearly many new people who have very little clue about the technology or how buying works. Many are buying whole coins and don't realize that they allow fractional quantities.

Another wave of new investors, like those who ventured in last year during the bull-run. The circle of life continues for Bitcoin. And yet Robinhood's interface leaves much to be desired for educating new investors.

Education needs to catch up NOW

Robinhood needs help documentation, videos, anything that they can link new users to within the app. This isn't to say almost all exchanges could use better help guides. This has been an ongoing problem that I thought would be fixed right now, especially after the cluster-fuck of last year's hysteria.

Sure, the tech is moving ahead much better, with lightening network, atomic swap, etc. But education for the layman hasn't caught up. I believe that educating users is as much a part of adoption as the tech itself.

Avoiding Bad Advice and Crypto "fake news"

There's still plenty of bad actors within chats, telegram, or webmasters. Images circle with fake coins offered by exchanges that someone just used a browser's inspect element feature to produce.

Just as Facebook had a fake news problem, crypto does also, but without a central authority to do much about it. Users must know this in order to avoid getting money. Though the wild west has been tamed over the years, it is still very much a rickety town in the desert.

Good documentation, guides, and sensible, non-hysterical videos need to continue, even if they are scattered all over the Internet. Crowding out the bad actors is essentially what we need to do with truthful content. Google knows good content when it sees it (usually) so these content producers will be rewarded more than scammers.

Leaders in the space should also point followers to good educators. The link juice helps Google, and a network affect builds up around the educator as more people find about him/her.