Currently, economic growth is constrained by available energy and resources. Non-renewable energy is becoming scarce and expensive, as are raw materials with which to manufacture goods.
"Go outer space, young boy".
The Trinity is Virgin+Bigelow+Planetary (Virgin Galactic for going to space, Bigelow Aerospace for living there, Planetary Ressources to work there)
Our economy is what I called an "empty world economy". Geographers (I hold a bachelors of geography) define our world as a "fully-exploited world" ("monde plein" in French, could not find an accepted translation). We need to go to outer space (or, in the interim, deep sea) to go back to a working economy - or else to change our economy, but inertia has it that the former is much easier than the latter.
Empty-world: when you picked up all the berries, hunted all the boars or drilled all the oil in the area, you just move to the next area.
Fully-exploited world: there is no more such a thing as a "next area". Now what?
Biology at the "rescue": in the food cycle, apex predators are predators with no one hunting them. They are so powerful that they are the king of the castle (hyena, wolves, eagles... humans). Barring natural catastrophes (volcanoes, meteorites...) no one can regulate them except themselves, which happens in two ways: infightings (such as mating season or wars) and... ressources depletion. That it, they grow so large that they shoot themselves in the foot. They starve to death. And in the case of animals smart enough to have a conscience of time and future, just before starving to deaht, they try one last desperate attemps: they kill the golden goose and borrow from the future: for finance, it means accepting loans and for natural resources, slash-and-burn (overfishing, exhausting soil with agressive fertilizer and killing the so-called "parasites" to have a short-term increases in productivity.
Connect the dots: humans are apex predators and, despite being intelligent enough to know it, cannot fight their own nature (environmentalism doesn't work that well, at least not fast enough) and are depleting their own ressources. What happens in a fully-exploited world with unstoppable apex predators? Ask the Pascuans (Eastern Island - yes, I know Jared Diamond's hypothesis is controverted, but that doesn't change the problem of suicidal apex predators and fully-exploited world).
And crypto-currencies have nothing to do with it.
@ eSmallChild..
Your point is well taken. Consider this, no currency or commodity is really a safe investment. None of them even currencies backed by something have true intrinsic value. We as humans just propose the illusion of value by agreeing to place faith in something like dollars or bitcoins and agree to use them to purchase things of a higher value like goods and services. In my mind the thing of highest value is time. You only get so much and that is it. Then after that is food and shelter. If we all agree that cryptocurrency has value for whatever reasons we may use then they have value. Does gold really have value? Can you eat it to survive? It has value because it is rare and people agree to assign to it a value. In reality its just an element like lead or copper or sodium.
Completely agree. Even so-called "commodity money" is nothing more than just another consensus - commodity money doesn't make more sense than fiat money (fiat: not the bitcointalk definition, but the actual definition, that is a money whose value is enforced by a central body). Dioxygen is one of the most precious ressources and it is extremely cheap.
Time (and its corollary, attention) is one of the few non-disputable currency. As a French TV magnate infamously said "what we actually are doing is selling attention span to Coca-Cola" (a.k.a. ads).
