The coronavirus is currently the talk of the entire world, causing widespread fears over the possibility of a global pandemic, a continued selloff across Bitcoin and the stock market, and it potentially being a black swan event that triggers the next recession.
But as fears continue and the virus spreads, the World Health Organization has just revealed a concerning fact about cash that could be the best reason to buy Bitcoin yet.
World Health Organization Warns of Tainted Cash, Says to Use Contactless Payments
The World Health Organization has warned the population that dirty banknotes may be spreading the virus and has provided steps regular citizens can take to prevent infection or further transmission of the coronavirus.
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Among the precautions people can take to prevent further spread, is simply by washing their hands more frequently, and especially after handling cash in any capacity.
Another way the WHO says people can protect themselves is by relying on contactless payments.
Contactless payments include smartphone-based services like Apple Pay, apps like Venmo, services like PayPal, and of course, Bitcoin.
Why Bitcoin is The Solution To Failing Fiat and Outdated Gold
But while services like Apple Pay and Venmo are great contactless alternatives, they actually share very few similarities with cash, unlike Bitcoin, which was designed to be the first-ever form of peer-to-peer digital cash.
Cash comes with a layer of anonymity and secrecy. People can store cash however they see fit and often use cash to hide any trace of their transactions from third-parties.
Any transaction made using Venmo or services like Apple Pay, must rely on a third-party to validate each transaction, and the paper trail left behind will point directly to the end-user.
Bitcoin, however, may also include a transparent distributed ledger that keeps track of all transactions, actually tying a cryptographic address to a user is a far more complicated process.
Bitcoin is also said to have the attributes of a safe haven asset, like gold.
The coronavirus has caused the stock market to crash, wiping out over $6 trillion in its largest single-week drop since the recession, and could bring forth the worst recession the world has ever seen.
Analysts are calling it a black swan event.
If the economy does indeed collapse, investors will need to store their capital somewhere, and it may not be falling stocks, or even fiat currencies that are on the brink of extinction.
Gold, the original safe haven asset has been skyrocketing as a result, but Bitcoin has often been called digital gold due to the cryptocurrency sharing many attributes with the precious metal, such as scarcity.
Related Reading | The Most Powerful Crypto CEO Is Skeptical of Bitcoin’s Future
With a recession on the horizon, and Bitcoin sharing the best attributes of both cash and gold, yet including additional benefits such as pseudo-anonymity, an inability to be counterfeited, and can be transferred from person-to-person without a third-party or ever handling dirty, tainted money, it’s easy to see what the cryptocurrency could be destined to become the future of finance.
And it may just be the coronavirus that brings Bitcoin into favor over easily contaminated cash.