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?
I think that if all the bitcoin would be mined then I think that the developers would either go and do two things. the first one would be to make and coordinate woth the cryptocimmunity for bitcoin into holding out another system on what to do with the mined bitcoin or they would go over and do again and create new bitcoin to mine for our miners. That i think would keep the bitcoin alive and would not put it to a halt because the developers know and would be thinking of this and I think that this would be up to them