It has a big warning saying to not use it with cash you aren't willing to lose.

This has tended to be true (that it’d go through within a few days), but right now it’s probably largely false.

Assume a small 226 byte transaction (one input and two outputs); at $50,000 per bitcoin, 50¢ is 1000 satoshi, which is about 4.4 satoshi per byte.

Per https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,30d, transactions with fees under 5 satoshi per byte were last cleared on February 8 (~8 days ago), and before that last on January 28 (~11 days). (Before that, such transactions stalled for about 12 days in October/November; other than that, it looks like such transactions never stalled for even a week back to the January 2018 craze, to say nothing of 50¢ being more satoshi per byte back then anyway.)

And if your transaction expires after a week——

It turns out that people were right when they said that it would take a long while for it to be adopted.

The miners then choose the transactions they want to include in a way, as to maximize their gains. As a block can only hold a certain amount of transactions and the limit being set by the weight-units [1], miners will want to prioritize the transactions that offer them bigger fees per weight unit, or usually expressed as sats/vbyte (satoshis per virtual bytes).

So if you don't need a transaction to arrive in the next 1-2 hours, you can lower your fees, and the transaction might pass in the night (although BTC is international, congestion is less on US night time and especially week-ends) or if not, probably in the week-end. If it doesn't clear fast enough, or as fast as hoped, then RBF (replace-by-fee) or CPFP (child-pays-for-parent) might help (manually or an increase of the fee could be automated by the wallet every set amount of time).

TL;DR: there is a free market for transactions, but the price is not dictated by the market (and there is no real bidding system), instead you suggest a fee, and see if any miner around the world wants to include it in a block (and you can adjust if the outcome isn't achieved, which has similar results to a bidding system... but is more like natural supply/demand mechanism, as miner do not guarantee to include a transaction).

Helpful to see current unconfirmed transactions (and sats/vbyte): https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,30d [info: the legend is clickable, and makes it easier to view how many higher paying transactions there are]

[1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weight_units

If you buy an option for a barrel of oil, Robinhood doesn't even deliver it to you. Same for wheat and gold. What a scam!

In all seriousness, if you want to speculate on the price of Bitcoin, Robinhood may be better than using some of these more sketchy exchanges that offer decent amounts of leverage.

If you want to actually purchase Bitcoin, there's regulated exchanges where you can do so, though that'll probably land you on some FBI watch list.

Even if the government didn't have that, they might still be able to deanonymize you via your transactions. Pseudonymity is not anonymity. If a single merchant identifies you as the buyer in a transaction, the government might be able to figure out the rest of your transactions in that chain.

I definitely would not call that a scam. I have no reason to move my BTC.

Besides, if you really want to own a given amount of bitcoins that you have in your robinhood account, you just liquidate your position in RH and use those funds to purchase bitcoins directly.