If you have a real-life fortune, surely you are paying something in some form or the other to secure that fortune from threats. If you have a digital fortune stored in the blockchain you can equally assign some funds (mining costs) to secure your fortune from threats. This means that large stakeholders (aka bagholders) have a vested interest in protecting the network. These stakeholders can operate even when the mining reward is negative for the average miner because the alternative is a non-option. Their cost/reward analysis is different than the average guy because they are co-factoring that if they had the wealth in physical form they'd still have to pay to secure it.
So you have the mining equilibrium plus the stakeholder backup to secure the network.
Then the end result is still the same. It is the same if you have a deflationary currency as if you have a inflationary currency.
If you have large stakeholders with lots of wealth to protect then just like in the real world, people have to pay a "vault fee" to keep their gold secure. Say this is 1% per year to keep it in some vault. So large stakeholders either become miners and paying an amount of electricity equal to the vault fee or pay someone else to secure the network for them, which again would be equal to the vault fee.
But if you have an inflationary currency where there is a percentage increase or as some have proposed a fixed subsidy for miners, then the large stakeholders will lose some percent per year due to inflation, in an ideal situation, this would likely be the same as the vault fee. So stakeholders will still lose say 1% of their holdings per year, equal to the "vault fee" but this would just be inflation.
So either way, you still lose. As others like to say, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Yea, it's a pretty obvious choice what has to be done in that regard. You have the option of having security built into the protocol by a minimum miner subsidy vs forcing people to accommodate with wildcard, unpredictable, real world solutions outside of the protocol that could lead to any number of undesirable solutions such as mining becoming a government run, non-profit utility.
When such a critical element of the Bitcoin protocol was overlooked, it almost feels like it was designed to fail, and we are being driven down a path like this on purpose to a centralized government scheme.
I'm not sure if BTC has the political will to even introduce a minimum miner subsidy, even though the problem could arise as soon as around 2025. I would like to see at least Litecoin try to implement such a solution.