Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Surprisingly, Tail Emission Is Not Inflationary

From: John Tromp <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2022 16:57:57 +0200

> New blog post:
> https://petertodd.org/2022/surprisingly-tail-emission-is-not-inflationary

A Tail Emission is best described as disinflationary; the yearly
supply inflation steadily decreases toward zero.

> Dogecoin also has a fixed reward

It started out with random rewards up to 1M doge per block, with the
maximum halving every 100K blocks, until the fixed reward of 10K doge
kicked in at height 600K.

> If an existing coin decides to implement tail emission as a means to fund security, choosing an appropriate emission rate is simple: decide on the maximum amount of inflation you are willing to have in the worst case, and set the tail emission accordingly.

Any coin without a premine starts with infinite inflation. Bitcoin in
its first 4 years had yearly inflation rates of inf, 100%, 50%, and
33%. So deciding on a maximum amount of inflation is deciding on a
premine.

While in the long term, a capped supply doesn't meaningfully differ
from un uncapped supply [1], the 21M limit is central to Bitcoin's
identity, and removing this limit results in something that can no
longer be called Bitcoin.

[1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-supply-1169a188d153