Sure people had houses before mortgages. They had sucky self-built houses on land they didn't own but rented, and nobody had any incentive to sell land, especially not to small time buyers. The UK still has the remains of that system, though there it's watered down enormously.
Do you agree that bitcoin massively disincentivizes spending anything but tiny amounts of currency ? Or at least, that it would have that effect if it was the only currency.
In the absence of this artificial demand, house prices come back down to much more reasonable levels. And you won't need to go in debt to buy a house (people had houses before mortgages existed, just like college used to be less expensive!). A sharp drop in housing prices is where the market was headed after 2008 until Bernanke started propping up prices with endless rounds of QE (literally endless, QE4 is to continue indefinitely.)
So: do you agree with the premise that housing prices will decline if Bernanke was not printing $1T/year ($85B/month) to buy mortgage backed securities? And if not, why not?