Bitcoin would continue to appreciate to infinity while an economy would shrink because nobody spends.
what if satoshi is an alien sent from his planet to conquer the earth and bitcoin is basically.... like a memetic virus created to destroy civilization with a tulup bubble that never crashes, it just inflates and inflates until everyone dies.
that alien will fail because btc would simply never reach widespread use and everone continues to use fiat.
the endgame with a deflationary currency is that its value grows exponentially and then explodes to zero. just like tulip mania.
this might be why btc is so volatile these days.
Anyway it's not at zero now because the jury is still out on if btc can address the fixed 21million supply in 2140. it might be addressable by instituting a fractional reserve/lending system. of course, the ability to create one in a decentralized environment has yet to be proven.
rofl. Sure the deflationary nature creates wild swings but thats only because speculators have no experience with a deflationary currency. They will eventually learn how to price this stuff in. and sure bitcoin may explode into a value of 0 a hundred years from now but so what, think of how many trades it will have facilitated by then.