What are the chances of bitcoin going extinct?
The probability for Bitcoin going extinct = 1 - p(BTC not going extinct).
Without going through this thread I expect that most of the answers will be something like "it is impossible to predict that" or "nobody knows". I think the truest of the answers would be to say that it is not zero and this has many reasons.
The possibility of Bitcoin becoming extinct, of course there are several factors such as the internet in the world being completely dead and that is the only cause of Bitcoin becoming extinct. The world is experiencing a third war that uses nuclear weapons where all the access we use today goes back to the stone age. But of course this doesn't happen all at once, there are stages that need to be gone through. Do we expect that to happen? Of course not and hopefully that never happens.
This is one aspect that is indeed true because when we think about events that could make BTC become extinct, there is a good chance that many other important things become extinct or are at threat. As soon as we have a technology that can derive private keys from public keys, the set of problems humanity would then be facing is much bigger than BTC going to zero.
The total market capitalization is a good indicator of the trust that people and institutions around the world put into BTC. The whole infrastructure that has been built and the investments that went into that infrastructure, the political endeavors in regards to ETFs and other investment products and many other things that are related to BTC are all positive signs that BTC won't suddenly disappear anytime soon.
But nobody knows whether the wheel will be around forever if there soon might be some other tool to move stuff from A to B, like vehicles based on magnetism and what not.
Since BTC is deflationary, there is a strong incentive for BTC network stakeholders to not jump ship. That's fundamentally different from FIAT currencies like the USD. BTC won't become inflationary where the USD already is. For the time being I think it is quite safe to assume that BTC will be around for quite a while
