Baruch was far from the only one to faint.
Over the course of a single day, the incidence of heart attacks on Manhattan Island rose by nearly ten percentage points.
The gloomy securities market, much like people's pessimistic expectations for the North American economy, plunged like a waterfall and smashed through the last psychological line of defense.
The chain reaction it triggered quickly swept across global financial markets, toppling dominoes from the Pacific Ocean across the Atlantic Ocean, then spreading from the stock market to the futures market...
What would it mean if the existing cryptographic system failed?
This was not merely a matter of stolen passwords or bank runs.
It meant that all financial products would lose their guarantees due to the failure of RSA and a whole series of other algorithms.
The first to take the hit were encrypted digital currencies like Bitcoin. E-commerce platforms that had previously opened Bitcoin payment channels shut down their Bitcoin wallet interfaces one after another, no longer supporting digital currency payments as they tried to distance themselves from it.
What collapsed immediately afterward was a series of financial derivatives.
Once existing encryption standards were confirmed to be unreliable, the impact on credit-based financial markets would be no less severe than the blow quantum computers dealt to Bitcoin.
With both the stock and bond markets getting hammered, all of Wall Street was shrouded in gloom.
But then again...
They were the ones who spent all day hyping up the threat from across the Pacific Ocean. They were also the ones who shifted their domestic conflicts over there, and the ones who pinned cybersecurity problems on Hua Nation's cyber warfare forces.
Although Hua Nation had not made a move, and doing so would be tantamount to proactively starting an information war with no benefits,