alt Hacker NewsRemember when the dot com bubble burst and after that the Internet became a billion times more important than before? Wikipedia didn't even exist when the dot com bubble collapsed!
All that bubble popping will do is wipe out some investor's money. Everything else will stay and become more and more important.
But of course, it is more profitable to sell one item for $1000 than it is to sell ten items for $100 each. And even if a competitor shows up, you can just price dump with all the extra money you already made until that competitor goes away.
This is what I say about any financial collapse/bubble pop/credit crunch. Resources don't blow up, people don't drop dead in the streets. A few rich folk who thought they were getting paid, aren't. Everything that happens after is second-order effects of them getting huffy about it. They don't have to cut wages and fire people and disrupt the supply chain; they could sacrifice their own largesse to keep things stable. (And the job of government in those circumstances is to force them to.)