Seeing the current fuss going on in the markets and the buzz that Bitcoin may lose its value down more to $1-2k levels (without any solid reasons except we may call this the biggest shake of investors' confidence), what do you really expect when the last Bitcoin gets mined?
I've got 2 things in my mind I'd like to share:
- Miners will push the fee higher and higher if the value drops (and even if it doesn't, they'll probably do the same because there won't be any rewards for the same and they'll not serve us for lower, maybe). So, after the hike in fee values, will there be the same clutter and people would sell BTC and choose some other alt for their money-making needs?
- Miners will completely stop mining BTC which would give us the chance to mine it with our PCs once again (maybe) and/or people might completely stop using BTC because there maybe a sudden drop in price (like we expected a price jump but it dropped like hell just because last BTC mined and mining fee hike as said in first scenario).
Miners can't unilaterally push fees higher unless they agree to restrict block size with a soft fork. That seems unlikely at this point, given what happened last year. The only way it would happen is if one entity controlled a majority of the hash rate and implemented the soft limit themselves.
However, if the long term uptrend holds and adoption continues, we can also expect fees to rise with no action from miners. In a situation of scarce block space and increasing demand for that block space, rising fees should compensate miners for the falling mining subsidy. Or it should at least soften the blow and prevent difficulty from plummeting.