Let's imagine that 2025, and we hit the fourth mining-rewards-halving. It's now unprofitable to mine given the existing numbers of miners, and users refuse to accept higher transaction fees, so 50% of miners exit, leaving half the profits to half the miners.
This means that 50% of the Bitcoin hardware is now on the market, being sold on the cheap. What do you need to compromise the security of the Bitcoin network? Why, 51% of the hardware--
At some point obsolete ASIC rigs should be coming on the market for cheap (but right now the reward isn't anywhere near 'full' in terms of the amount of electricity apparently being used to chase it).
(FWIW, I expect a crisis of confidence long before 2025. Let's see how many miners are left after that happens.)
Part of the genius of the block award being so top-heavy in the beginning is that it made the network much more secure than it would have been if it had relied on transactions from the beginning which will allow it to mature and stabilize before supply & demand determines what the market is willing to bear in transaction fees.
In addition, it allowed a decentralized method of distributing the coins that isn't able to be gamed.