[rcxdude]

Yeah, I think this is a strong reason why bitcoin as a 'store of value' makes little sense over long time periods. If ultimately you need to burn a substantial fraction of the value of the pot to keep someone from running away with it, in the limit where no more bitcoin is being created then you basically have an asset which has large maintenance costs but no productivity. If a cryptocurrency is being used to transact reasonably efficiently (which bitcoin absolutely is not), then there's value being created by this which makes the costs worthwhile. But if it's not and the idea is people mostly sit on it, it's hard to see how it works out in the long term. (I mean, gold is the same to some extent, it costs some money to run a vault, but what's the relative costs? certainly it doesn't cost as much to keep the entire world's supply of gold secure as it does to run the bitcoin network, and gold's market cap is 20x that of bitcoin)

Unfortunately I think there's a lot of supply of coin and cheap electricity left to keep fueling it for far longer than it makes sense.