A woman speaks with a worker at a cryptocurrency exchange in Hong Kong, April 2024. AFP-Yonhap

During the 1920s, the U.S. had a dream: that one day, anyone could become rich through investment in the stock market, and no one believed in that dream more than Charles Edwin Mitchell, a celebrated financial genius who, in his advocacy for the democratization of investing in the stock market to the masses, also subsequently singlehandedly triggered the Great Depression.

“It became fashionable to invest in the stock market — a fad — and a new generation of unsophisticated investors entered the market eager to make their fortunes,” Frederick Lewis Allen said of the decade, often nicknamed the Roaring ’20s.

Fast-forward a century later to the…