Right now we're approaching about 17 million out of 21 million possible bitcoins. When we reach the max supply, what incentive would miners have to continue mining and verifying transactions? Sure they can still collect fees, but why not mine newer and more profitable coins where they have the chance to collect both fees and new coins?
What's stopping the entire blockchain from grinding to a halt, prohibiting users from conducting transactions, and thereby making bitcoin worthless?
Bitcoin has been programmed by satoshi to have only 21million coins due to which bitcoin has this much high demand.So the total number of bitcoins remains unchanged.Its not based on the miner's wish to mine just 21 million coins or more than it.
If that total number of bitcoins gets changed, then bitcoin would lose its huge demand.Then it would also get subject to deflation.
After all the bitcoins gets mined, the transaction fee will be adjusted to compensate the miners and at that time after 140ym years, bitcoin price would be very high so that miners would not be getting any loss.