When that ends of course nobody will pay the actual $80-100 per transaction in electricity actually required to secure the network making it vulnerable to a 51% attack.
Ha, no. Theres a thing called "security" and if you don't pay for it your gold evaporates or walks away.
It's not really that simple. There is a different breakdown when you look at individual vs global costs. There is a cost to an individual for storing gold - e.g. building a vault, hiring a guard etc. This cost was the original incentive scheme behind the early banks - if we pool our gold storage then we can pool our security costs. Beyond that individual cost there is no additional global cost for storage.
Bitcoin is free to store for an individual. Once funds are stored at an address in the blockchain they will stay there. Although the global cost is huge it is invisible at the individual level - nobody needs to participate in mining the chain to hold bitcoin.
History suggests that individuals favor situations where the costs have been socialized and are not visible at the individual level.
The cost to store Bitcoin is the cost to secure the network, and its outrageous. Further it scales linearly with the price of Bitcoin as block reward value does.
Science says we’re already pretty much fucked if we don’t go full-on panic mode, and here we are, still wasting this opportunity, if not to keep our feet dry, at least to keep our chin above water...