“As someone trying to raise [venture capital] right now, I am very concerned that this is going to implode the entire industry,” one person wrote in a forum on the technology-focused website Hacker News earlier this week. It’s understandable that investors and entrepreneurs would be “watching this Uber situation unfold closely,” as Mike Isaac, the New York Times reporter, put it in a tweet about the Hacker News post. Especially at a time when rising interest rates give investors more options, and ostensibly make the highly valued pre-IPO companies like Uber less attractive.

But how much is the tech industry’s fate actually wrapped up in Uber’s? If Uber implodes, will the bubble finally pop? It’s a question that’s full of assumptions: Uber’s fate is uncertain, and nobody really knows what kind of bubble we’re in right now. Yet it’s a question still worth teasing apart. Trillions of dollars, thousands of jobs, and the future of technology all hang in the balance.

“These bubbles swing back and forth in fear and greed,” McGrath told me, “and when Uber stumbles, it triggers fear. Part of this bubble is created basically in a low-interest-rate environment. Money from all over the world is pouring into this sector because it has nowhere else to go.”

This is a key point—perhaps the key point that will determine whether Uber lives or dies. Uber isn’t worth $70 billion because it is actually worth $70 billion. Its valuation is that high despite the fact that it’s not profitable, and despite the fact that it has little protection from competitors baked into what it is and does. Uber’s valuation, in other words, is a reflection of the global marketplace and not a reflection of Uber’s own durability as a company.

“To me, it’s a big question of whether they are going to be able to sustain the business model,” McGrath told me. “They have been very disruptive to incumbents, but there are no significant barriers to entry to their model. If you switch [services], you maybe have to re-enter your credit-card information and download a new app, but from there you’re good to go. There are pundits who say it’s only a matter of time.”

And then what? If Uber goes kablooey, what happens to all the other unicorns—the 187 startups valued at $1 billion or more apiece, according to the latest count by the venture capital database CB Insights?

Despite Uber’s influence, it’s unlikely that the company’s potential failure would set off too terrible of a chain reaction in Silicon Valley, several economists told me. “You need to make a distinction,” McGrath said, “between the startups that are really creating value and have something that will protect them in the event of imitation—versus the ones that are built on a lot of assumptions that really haven’t been tested yet, and money has been pouring into them because [it] have nowhere else to go.”