you guys are so bearish.
In the situation I describe below where there's a continuously decreasing amount of goods and services (perma-deleveraging), I think metals are the biggest winner since they have the least amount of counterparty risk. But, bitcorn would probably see some benefit too even though Bitcoin has FAR HIGHER counterparty risk than people claim:
When complex systems collapse, they devolve into simpler ones. They never jump into a higher tier of complexity. Complex systems also tend to require exponential resource (energy) curves. Peak
conventional crude oil already happened in 2004. Peak
working age demographic already occurred in every nation that matters.
Wealth comes from people doing work in the real world, not shuffling around papers. That work is either done from things like burning fuel to do the work for you, or humans physically doing it themselves. With both working age demographic and energy output declining, people will be spending more time and effort doing work for the basic necessities and nobody is going to be overpaying people for shuffling numbers on a computer unless it involves something to do with solving the energy problem.
"Excess" energy is why a day's wage in Rome was a small amount of silver and why it's a larger amount of silver now. Instead of humans having to dig it up, the work was being done for free by machines, thus devaluing it's worth. But, the time of arbitraging "free" energy into depleting all resources like metals as fast as possible is over now (that and the fact peak metals is occurring regardless the state of energy). Unless fusion power solves all these problems (not likely because fusion is actually low EROI), then we already hit peak energy, peak cheap metals, peak cheap food, and this energy arbitrage scheme is ending, possibly in a Seneca cliff.
Here's one example of such a chart. Remember that all wealth is based on energy output since abundance is really just machines burning fossil fuels to do work for you instead of you doing it. In the gas sector, the high energy yielding conventional stuff is all cratering, so all they did was grab more of the lower return on investment stuff to try and compensate (same thing in the oil market). So, as this cycle continues, your civilization's wealth continues to decrease until you get to the point of borderline thermodynamic collapse if it uses as much energy to drive the shale oil to market as it does to extract it (and shale is low return on investment).
So, I hate to rain on your parade, but there is no so called knowledge age unless there's some type of enormous energy breakthrough. Russian govt energy analysts see things getting really bad by around 2020 and say there is no technological solution in sight. There is no coming out on the other side of the monetary reset with some type of "utopia". In fact, one of the reasons it's currently crashing is because it relies on infinite growth and the energy situation prevents that.
