If BTC is not dead by then, it will likely have some sort of active user base, meaning non-zero fees.
If the fees are low, verifiers will stop verifying.
If enough stop verifying, the prize pool grows (more network congestion leads to higher fees). This eventually stabilizes at some equilibrium (likely leading to a weaker chain, if profit is the only motivator).
It's also worth noting that if BTC has seen enough adoption to be sustainable for the next 100 years, there are likely many many stakeholders who could/would mine for "altruistic" reasons. E.g. financial institutions and other large holders have incentives to keep the network stable.
Hell, maybe by then they get enough people on board for a BTC 2 that's some weird Ethereum competitor. It's really hard to theorize on that long of a time horizon.
As transaction fees increase to cover the cost of security (even an "altruistic" (self-interested) financial system needs to pay for energy) users are less likely to transact which is positive feedback on the transaction fee.
If deflation cannot outpace this then Bitcoin effectively dies. The longer you leave funds on the chain the more you will pay to pull them out. If deflation does outpace security cost you have runaway infinite deflation that is no longer tied to a from of scarcity but instead the cost of securing the chain. That doesn't seem great either.
> Hell, maybe by then they get enough people on board for a BTC 2 that's some weird Ethereum competitor. It's really hard to theorize on that long of a time horizon.
Possible, but I don't know if I'm optimistic about humanity's ability to generate collective consensus in the face of crisis.
If BTC is not dead by then, it will likely have some sort of active user base, meaning non-zero fees.
If the fees are low, verifiers will stop verifying.
If enough stop verifying, the prize pool grows (more network congestion leads to higher fees). This eventually stabilizes at some equilibrium (likely leading to a weaker chain, if profit is the only motivator).
It's also worth noting that if BTC has seen enough adoption to be sustainable for the next 100 years, there are likely many many stakeholders who could/would mine for "altruistic" reasons. E.g. financial institutions and other large holders have incentives to keep the network stable.
Hell, maybe by then they get enough people on board for a BTC 2 that's some weird Ethereum competitor. It's really hard to theorize on that long of a time horizon.