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Re:Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC by api on Monday April 01, 2013 @02:00PM (#5474712)
Sustainability is really the achilles heel of inflationary economics. The Earth is finite. Exponential growth cannot continue forever. When a steady state is reached, that's apocalyptic to inflationary money systems since debts all the sudden can never be repaid.

Edit: I don't think space colonization matters here. Sure, it may be possible. But Mars is sufficiently far from Earth and the energy cost of transport sufficiently high that a populated Mars would effectively be an entirely separate economy for everything but intangibles. I don't think a Mars colony would permit Earthly exponential growth to continue, even though Martian exponential growth could occur for quite some time. (Until Mars' own unique limits were reached.)

Re:Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC by vbuterin on Monday April 01, 2013 @02:40PM (#5475020)
> everything but intangibles

So, everything but 90% of the economy in forty years' time?

Re:Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC by makomk on Monday April 01, 2013 @06:28PM (#5476343)
Why would you want to repay the debts in the first place?
Re:Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC by alexmat on Monday April 01, 2013 @06:56PM (#5476469)
If the interest rate drops.
Re:Bitcoin exchange rate reached $100 USD per BTC by Evbn on Monday April 01, 2013 @06:40PM (#5476391)
People will find plenty of ways to kill each other before the Earth's resources are exhausted. We have a billion year energy supply and raw materials are never lost, only converted from one form to more annoying forms.