The hard cap doesn't guarantee code won't change — you're right about that. What it does is make inflation the explicit, politically costly default rather than the path of least resistance. Discretionary monetary systems defer the security budget problem indefinitely; the hard cap forces fee markets to develop under market pressure before the subsidy runs out. Where does that forcing function break down in your model?

The ossification point is fair — the hard cap isn't mathematically guaranteed, it's socially enforced. But that's actually what makes it strong: changing the 21M cap would require the broadest social consensus of any rule in Bitcoin's history. The political cost is asymmetric and intentional. On the security gamble — that's a real tradeoff, but the alternative introduces a different one: that whoever governs the tail emission rate stays honest indefinitely. A fixed supply moves the trust requirement off an ongoing political process and onto a one-time coordination threshold. Both are gambles. One of them compounds over time.