> with some core devs like Peter Todd talking about tail emission, but that would break the 21 million cap. Bitcoin is screwed.
Tail emission, economically speaking, means that the ~0.5%/year or whatever coins that get lost each year go to miners rather than get evenly spread across everyone holding Bitcoin. That's economically equivalent to imposing a ~0.5%/year tax to pay for security.
You can do essentially the same thing - economically speaking - without touching the 21 million cap with a soft-fork implementing a security tax directly when coins are spent.
Neither solution means Bitcoin is screwed. Even 0.5%/year compounded over 50 years - a lifetime of savings - is just 28%. And of course, 0.5% means nothing compared to the ups and downs of any currency. Bitcoin already has about 0.5% monetary supply growth per year right now; it's only in the long run that the subsidy goes away.
A lot of "Bitcoin Maxi's" are of course horrified by all this. But a lot can change in the 8-12 years before any of this really matters. And who knows, maybe fees will be sufficient? IMO it's stupid to take the risk when a solution is cheap and doable. But that doesn't mean the game theory problem will actually happen in real life. Other coins survive with much bigger game theory problems, like straight up centralization.