I feel strongly that the stock market is due for a massive crash but I'm also aware of the possibility that some highly connected individuals may find a way to

I feel strongly that the stock market is due for a massive crash but I'm also aware of the possibility that some highly connected individuals may find a way to cheat, cover up and censor their way to extend the 'growth' period by some arbitrarily long amount of time by which point my put options will have expired many times over. There is no way that the stock market would experience a massive crash without some serious massive-scale cheating. If this is an extinction-type event, some banks would go rogue and come up with new (possibly illegal) ways to start printing money to prop up the stock market... Given the complexity of the monetary system and correspondent banking, they could keep this going for a while. I mean there are thousands of institutions involved and countless ways to corrupt the system. Our modern system is all made up of centralized databases with thousands of participants trusting each other; trusting the data that all those thousands of distinct centralized systems are reporting and treating them as if they were a cohesive whole... That's our monetary system; thousands of databases managed by different people who trust each other based on what each others' systems are reporting with no way to verify any of those systems.