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.
I think it is you who does not understand how bitcoin works.