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Notes -
Not that this undermines the main thrust of your point, Chris Stucchio put out a series of posts explaining the mechanics and social value of HFT, as well as some of its problems. The gist is that HFT charges people for liquidity, which compensates them for taking on risk, and also helps expose the "true" value of assets that large buyers try to keep hidden. So there's at least a solid argument that it's not just "a legal way of taking other peoples' money".
Furthermore, its worth noting that a non-fraudulent FTX would be providing a similar sort of value to HFT (liquidity), which suggests that actual SBF running a fraudulent FTX is much worse.
The problem here is that price discovery for crypto doesn’t really make sense the way that it does for say, stocks or bonds. It’s not just a risk asset with a speculative component, the whole thing is speculation.
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