As contagion spreads and more people are infected across the world, we are seeing ripple effects across the global economy. Lots of people on the Internet are talking about how this could be the beginning of the next Great Depression, and supply chains are falling apart.
Nationalism has definitely been on the rise over the years, and with supply chains being hindered all over the world, the idea of being an independent country is going to become more important. Doing so will require massive amounts of technological advancement of the type we haven’t seen before.
The Internet connected us all, and now blockchain needs to take us further. Ideally, it will allow for us to achieve new levels of connectivity, while bringing more trust to the Internet.
A Change Is Coming
So if we do go into another depression, we’ll see the finance, healthcare, government, and many other sectors get completely reinvented. Some institutions will have to be torn down and replaced with newer versions. The upside to a crash is that it will incentivize this change to happen more quickly.
The fact that stocks are in freefall and have had their biggest down day since 2011 is cause for alarm. But it is also cause for many people to start thinking about why stocks are falling so much when productivity is staying the same? Is it possible that this bull run was merely caused by high inflation in the US dollar due to quantitative easing?
As gauche as it is to discuss the idea of a deadly virus being good for an investment, this will likely cause many more people to buy Bitcoin as a way to diversify away from their exposure to one national economy.
Other Industries Than Banking
It isn’t just about healthcare. It’s about how supply chains all over the world are shutting down. The FDA has already announced their first drug shortage due to Coronavirus, and this is expected to continue. The US remained largely dependent on China for their prescription drugs for years, and now that problem is coming to light.
With stricter management of supply chains, cryptocurrencies built around optimizing supply chains, like WaltonChain, will become more prominent. And there are going to be cases like this everywhere. An institution or methodology will be revealed to have weaknesses, and a company will pop up that is capable of solving that problem.
Ethereum is about changing the way the Internet and computation is managed, and there will be many more examples of this. So even though this could be the beginning of a crash in the markets, it is actually going to enable more technological advancement than ever before. Where things go after that, who’s to say?