Bitcoin will be reborn before 2038 when it has no choice but to hard fork

There's a couple of ways Bitcoin could die. At least what we think of as being Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a social contruct you see, like the idea of money itself, or family, the notion of nations, the idea of "hispanic", or "western societies" (the idea that speakers of the same language although not part of the same country are still part of the same culture).

Social constructs can get really messy. They are simply agreed upon rationalizations for organization. So Bitcoin. We think of Bitcoin as a network of nodes with miners that compete to win a block and present their solution to the nodes to collect their prize. What if, a whole generation or 5, all decided, Bitcoin was just whatever was in their bank account. Of course, the idea of a bank account has shifted, we started to call bank accounts wallets for some reason. I'm talking about wallet of satoshi of course. Well lets imagine that not self-custodying Bitcoin was the normal thing, and all custodians got rug pulled, but what if these people decided, actually, whats in these accounts are what Bitcoin is and that they aren't going to listen to these nerds declaring their software is what real Bitcoin is.

Another way, is when humanity ventures into space. I don't think you can soft fork in longer block times. So what would be considered a "new" currency would have to be introduced, or maybe it gets hard forked in somehow, but I don't know how, but I feel as though strong needs tend to shape social constructs. So it may be possible to hard fork Bitcoin on the basis of very strong needs.

heat death of the universe

My concern from the beginning (and the reason it took me so long to get on board) is that it goes to zero if a new cryptocurrency with convincingly better properties is created.

Obviously, I don't know what that looks like, but Bitcoin solves problems that were unknown to the world before electronic communication and there could be new problems in a future technological landscape that Bitcoin is unequipped to handle.

Currencies come and go, but commodities stay forever

The thing that makes Bitcoin special among human inventions (or 'discoveries', if you're in that camp) is that unlike other technologies, Bitcoin requires: (a) an un-gameable incentive structure to keep the system sufficiently decentralized and to keep Bitcoin's most fundamental properties: sound and permissionless money. (b) network participants to continue acting rationally for the indefinite future.

Think about fire, electricity or even gold: these things continue to exist whether humans are dumb or not. They don't disappear just because there is no incentive structure, or when humans start acting against their self interest.

So IMHO, Bitcoin can "die" either when the incentive structure becomes gameable (e.g. Bitcoin evolves into a system that is top-heavy on layer 2, which can corrupt the incentives of the base layer), or humans start acting irrationally (for various reasons).

I wrote more about Bitcoin's unique dependence on rationality here. https://hugonguyen.medium.com/bitcoins-incentive-scheme-and-the-rational-individual-dc20effa4715

If a huge amount of Bitcoin becomes concentrated in institutions, making it possible to be seized by central banks. It will go the way of gold at that point. Maybe it won’t die exactly, but the promise will.

Btcจะตายได้เมื่อเรามีระบบการเงีนที่ดีครับ

Bitcoin dies when you die

If humanity ever loses the need for money. (Post-scarcity society?)

The US dollar going back to the gold standard and eliminating the FED would do a pretty good job of stopping bitcoin. But we know these two things are not going to happen until they both completely fail.

that's like asking how a law of physics would "die" someday