[jonstaab]

Well, over the same time period, but gold has been mined for thousands of years, and for a long time much less efficiently. And bitcoin mining will decelerate as halving occurs, until the last coin is mined in a bit over 100 years' time.

[tromp]

Increasing fees are expected to make up for the repeated halving of block subsidy, as is necessary to maintain network security (and one of the major reasons why Bitcoin constrains block size). Within another 4 halvings, fees should start to dominate.