"the value of mining rewards is only going to continue rising" is not consistent with the design of Bitcoin. There is a finite number of BTC left to mine (15% o

"the value of mining rewards is only going to continue rising" is not consistent with the design of Bitcoin. There is a finite number of BTC left to mine (15% of the eventual total?) and the amount of BTC received from mining is designed to halve every four years, so in the long run BTC processing will have to be funded more by transaction costs and less so by mining. "How would governments even begin to stop it" - I don't thing that governments will choose to try it, but if they did want to do so, a simple ban on all sale and barter in BTC would work. It wouldn't stop all trade, but making exits difficult would reduce investment interest sufficiently to get a huge decrease in price, especially since current price seems mostly defined by "store of value" i.e. investment arguments, not based on usefulness for transactions. If many investors can't exit, then it ceases to be a good store of value for them, reducing the demand. For example, Tesla $1.5B purchase was a big pressure upwards; but if it's known that no such purchases are ever coming again, and that Tesla's holding is now worthless (unlike some small-scale drug trader, a US company like Tesla can't really use a black market or person-to-person transactions to exhange it for anything), that would kill the short-term price; this would mean that the mining costs much more than their electricity costs (there is an inherent lag in block difficulty adjustments that's potentially huge in case of a rapid slowdown in mining rate) which may cause many miners to cease mining.