Meanwhile one of my younger friends in his 20s can't seem to understand Bitcoin. He thinks it's some kind of pyramid/Ponzi scam and that "the government" will "shut it down". Meanwhile he alternates between Mom's couch in Toronto and Dad's winter place in Thailand trying to get rich playing online poker. All this for a kid with a tested IQ over 180. Go figure.
Wow. A poker player with an IQ over 180? Very surprising he does not "get" bitcoin.
You are the one that does not "get" bitcoin. Even if you ignore the fact that it's designed to completely centralize, bitcoin is 100% guaranteed to die the closer the block reward gets to zero. Why? Because a static block reward subsidizes all transactions just like a govt subsidy. The second it's gone, people will just move to a different chain that still has a block reward subsidizing it, or to some other system that doesn't have the overhead of PoW since they're all designed to centralize anyway. So yes, bitcoin actually is a Ponzi because PoW is not sustainable since you CANNOT prevent competitor chains from taking it's market once subsidy is gone.
Subsidizing miners with block rewards only makes it more difficult to perform a doublespend or a denial of service attack by producing empty blocks. It doesn't really motivate people to use the chain. Normal users are ignorant of how bitcoin works under the hood. They don't care about this stuff. They would only care if someone did successfully doublespend or DOS the block chain. So as long as transaction fees are sufficient to incentivize miners to collectively produce enough hashing power to prevent this than there is no reason to expect the drop off in block rewards to negatively effect bitcoin in any way.
Jesus Christ you cultists are dense. Since you failed to comprehend what I said, let me spell it out for you in simple math. Bitcoin currently spends $112,500 every 10 minutes in order to attempt to secure the chain (obviously unsustainable). Some would argue this is overdoing it and the chain could get by with much less security (it's not really "security" since it's designed to centralize, but we will overlook that for now). Let's give bitcoin the benefit of the doubt and make believe at full maturity, it could get by with 1/10th of that, or blowing $10,000 on PoW every 10 minutes without getting "owned".
As you can see from that unsustainable $112k figure, the block reward provides Bitcoin with it's security model by BORROWING from the future to subsidize the present via unsustainable Ponzi. The second you remove the block reward, your security is no longer free (or rather Ponzi derived security where people make believe buying now automatically gives them more value in the future), but then shifts the security from a borrowing from the future model to where only the present matters.
Once only the present matters, if people are not willing to shell out $10k per 10 minutes to have miners process their transactions/secure the chain (or whatever arbitrary number you come up with), then bitcoin dies and no longer exists. $10k per 10 minutes is a pretty large overhead, and there is no actual reason for end users to subsidize that. They can simply go to a different chain where a block reward still exists, thus getting their transactions processed cheaper by joining a different Ponzi that's still running.
The fact you cannot prevent people from fleeing Bitcoin once it's mining subsidy craters to get their transactions processed cheaper somewhere else is why bitcoin 100% inevitably dies once block reward gets closer to zero. In reality, the most likely outcome would be bitcoin converting to something like proof of stake to try and prevent collapse. PoW and PoS are all designed to centralize garbage, but PoW attempts to get by with a "decentralized" meme by being an open entropy system (that is centralized through economy of scale and the large knowledge and capital reserves required to build the foundries and chips). If bitcoin is forced to convert to PoS just to survive (closed entropy systems cannot even pretend to be decentralized like bitcoin pretends to now), the whole thing was obviously an unsustainable Ponzi scam in the first place.
