I might edit this later, but I'll leave it as is. Some of it is relevant, most of it is tangential. A lot of the ideas contained in this are not adequately presented, but whatevs I still spent about 20 minutes making this comprehensible.
Most of the material in the universe is negligible in terms of utility--or-you could fuse a Gold planet with the energy it would take to perform intergalactic transportation. One day energy will overtake mining for some things, especially for elements lighter than iron. It will take longer for the others to be more cost effective to fuse. Scarcity is difficult to avoid but there are definitely unused sources of energy, my favorite is the orbit of the Earth. The Earth has a lot momentum, you can make orbital turbines/centrifuges that can gather energy and and allow the rotation to accelerate for the best momentum. That would not be cheap to do obviously but it will eventually aid in fusion and will still generate lots of energy before the eventual modifications. A centrifuge is also good for making artificial gravity(they have one on the space station already)/space tourism/microgravity and/or highgravity research etc.--I doubt fusion will replace conventional energy sources in my lifetime; the idea that it will overtake mining is unfathomable, so I wouldn't hold out for that potential. However, having totally flexible companies in a free market, while also having a monetary sector, would make it very easy to finance a lot of endeavors which have much slower returns without including the profit of comparative advantage (and buyout potential). Private competing currencies allow for leverage acquisition/rsi to be taken into account within the economy, which can yield much faster returns on spending with enhanced purchasing power---as more people are willing to accept a form of credit, the liquidity is strengthened and the issuer gains a larger share of the total credit supply in buying power. Or-if you have terms of service that apply to the types of credit you are willing to accept in two-way transactions, then you have a subscription system that uses hedge fund principles to valuate currencies within the economy, whose providers maintain their value by their capacity to trade resources for their own money, and the ability to offload their currency onto subscribers.
I would also have to say that part of the issue of scarcity is regulatory/unintentionally making supplements less viable by taking stake in the existing structure-which is good at first but is exponentially inertial. Using the state's power of acquisition and dispute resolution is critical to maintaining the necessity of certain commodities. I would expect a lot more renewable materials as supplements in a totally freed system, just because there is no small scale in the monetary sector, since it could be valued in terms of liquidity/level of support/number of subscribers. In such a system, which could potentially yield immediate returns on long positions, it would be in-feasible to prevent the financing of supplemental means to the materials being provided.
Another interesting change that will come about in the next century is hedged manufacturing or even open-source manufacturing/ which may allow for intra-day recall and modification of a manufacturing position/that is--allowing for multiple outs in the manufacturing process, which are currently unavailable without 3D printing. This is an approach which emphasizes loss reduction-3D printing can cut down a lot of inertia in market adaptability, and allow you to go into production without being sure exactly what you aim to produce, selecting instead for a set of devices with like materials. It will also make it possible to limit an item's value to a combination of its melt value, the value of converting it into other devices, and the value of those devices averaged, divided by the value of the item prior to reassessment-which unfortunately would not be fixed and would trail that valuation--but it would still be much cheaper than existing manufacturing. So-you would expect that people would still find a way to price items-with the given that this method is preferred and not made obsolete by externalities.
It may also allow for better amphibious transit--especially for seafaring city structures where you can carry factories around. Or--you can mine steel for instance and leave with a better vessel by regenerating the vessel on sight with additional materials--or improve existing drills in real-time. The melt/convert/regenerate aspect of 21st century manufacturing will probably be the most rapid advancement in production that has every been developed. The actual cost of the item is one thing--they can pay less to manufacture but it makes no difference if the MPC is the same--however--if you take out the regulations a few things would happen--it is easy to scale down (you have more hard-hitting entrants--which compounded with monetary leverage allows new entrants to have comparable scale to existing giants--more likely:_it would draw out executives and board members from competing institutions or provoke mergers) On the other side of new manufacturing practices is a copyrights issue with a problem very similar to the Napster issue, but it isn't necessarily, unconditionally negative. On the up side, it would greatly reduce restriction of accessibility or concentration of providers, by having unmanageable numbers of copycat providers. It also probably would not hinder innovation, but would work more similarly to software patching, for the immediate conservation returns. Taking a more open-source approach--you have people making patches for their own means of production--ignoring the benefits it provides to others or otherwise concealing specific patches like temporary, vantage-based trade secrets (some uploaded for traffic some kept on drives) it when necessary. One other thing--is that when you have a new material in a melt/conversion paradigm, there is a great incentive to use the cheapest materials for everything, since any patch which replaces a material with a cheaper one--is advantageous to apply, so long as the modification to an existing device exceeds the value of converting it from one schematic to another-either in part or in full. Precisely: you can mine your devices by updating them, replacing the existing device with a device of comparable utility but with cheaper present melt value and with a remainder commodity produced outside the modified device.
