Why would anybody continue operating nodes once all the pre-programmed bitcoins are minted? It's currently minted over 18 million and the max is a little over 21 million. It rewards its miners with new btc every so often. If it loses miners then transactions take longer to complete. Paraphrasing from this: https://www.quora.com/What-if-everyone-stop-mining-Bitcoin

If the main developers decide, no, we can mint more coins then the premise gets even more muddy.

> Why would anybody continue operating nodes once all the pre-programmed bitcoins are minted?

There are two parts to the reward for mining a block: newly minted bitcoins, which follow a fixed distribution and decrease over time (halving every four years), and transactions fees. The intent is that as the supply of new bitcoins decreases the transaction fees will make up the difference to sustain a reasonable level of competition among miners even with no new bitcoins entering circulation.

> If it loses miners then transactions take longer to complete.

Only in the short term. As long as the loss isn't too sudden, over time the difficulty will adjust until one block is once again being solved every ten minutes on average. (There is some risk from sudden reductions in the hash rate, as the adjustment takes some time—and that time is measured in blocks mined at the higher, unadjusted difficulty.)

I think people holding the major amounts know it's a scam. They're waiting for enough liquidity to exit.

Perhaps at some point it'll "go to the moon", and people will start to cash-out. In many ways, the more popular crypto becomes, the less stable/usable/sensible it will be.