Its fine, once institutions gobble up all the coins and the block reward disappears the blockchain can just stop. Bitcoin got eaten up by institutions.
If you made money by buying bitcoin a long time ago, you didn't get something for nothing. And if you sell it now, you can profit before the game of musical chairs collapses. So there is a limited window of arbitrage.
A little bit of work multiplied by a lot of risk and time.
Also it didn’t require any real work, just blind faith or forgetting that you even had bitcoin to begin with for a while.