Part 6/14:
Jacking the System: From Bucket Shops to Cryptocurrency
Historically, stock speculation was already rigged in the form of bucket shops—tiny, clandestine establishments where people bet on stock prices without actually owning shares. Their enormous volume in early 20th century America fueled the 1907 stock market panic, magnifying fears and causing real economic distress.
Modern parallels include platform-based trading apps like Robinhood, which democratized access but also fostered a casino-like atmosphere. Robinhood has openly married stock trading with crypto speculation, tokenizing private assets like OpenAI and SpaceX shares. What they pitch as "decentralized stock tokens" is essentially speculative bets on assets that are not traded or held in any traditional sense.