There have been tons of economies which worked before on the Gold standard, which has been the model for the bitcoin "mining" model. I know nowadays you have lots of Keynesian economists who tell you that going in debt to the death and inflating the money supply is a good thing, but you have to look at how things worked before and why it made sense to have a limited supply currency.
Nope, the new discoveries of gold were usually marginal vs the actual worldwide gold reserves. Bitcoin is following the exact same model. Mining will become marginal over time.
