Everyone loves to talk about the 21 million cap, but we almost never talk about Bitcoin's dirty little secret: the year 2140.
That's when the block rewards officially run out. No more new Bitcoin. From that point on, the entire security of the network—the miners who protect it from attack—will rely only on transaction fees.
The theory is that a mature, global Bitcoin network will have enough fee volume to pay for its own security. But is that a guarantee? What happens if Layer 2 solutions thrive and most transactions happen off-chain, starving the main chain of fees?
Are we placing our faith in a future fee market that might not be strong enough to secure a multi-trillion dollar asset? Or is this a non-issue that the protocol will naturally solve?
Is Bitcoin's security budget a fatal flaw we're just kicking down the road?
2140 is too far, it's not our generation's problem, it's something that the next generations should take care of because then it will be their job. At the moment, we have to look at Bitcoin and act accordingly. Right now, everything is under control, Bitcoin's price is high enough to keep mining profitable, and the mining reward is still good enough. I believe that in the next halving, the price will double. As countries adopt Bitcoin and save their reserves in Bitcoin, we will have a very strong cryptocurrency. I'd say that in the next 12 years, we are very safe but then I believe that something has to change for Bitcoin as a payment system to be able to include lots of transactions at relatively good fees to let people frequently make Bitcoin payments and increase the fees per mined block.