Quote from: JorgeStolfi on January 13, 2015, 01:55:03 PM

Besides perhaps the mistaken notion that the inflation of national currencies is a bad thing,

Can we not have both? National currencies without a fixed supply, and Bitcoin with?

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the fixed money supply is something that a computer scientist would have chosen for ease of implementation. An unbounded money supply would have been a pain to program; he could not have used a fixed block and transition layout with 64-bit long ints, he would have needed a variable-length multiword integer, in the layout and in the implementation.

I don't buy it. I haven't read all the old correspondences, so correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't having a fixed money supply something that was discussed in moneypunk/cypherpunk circles?

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That is only one of many details in the protocol that suggest that it was never meant to be more than a computer experiment.

This is disingenuous. Many ideas aren't meant to be more than an experiment, until they work.

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Take, for example, the abrupt halving of the reward every 4 years: it is a source of instability and uncertainty, the 2016 halving is already having people worried now. Why didn't he specify a more gradual decrease, that would give the same 0.5 factor in 4 years but in small monthly steps? The only reason I can think of is that it would have required another page or two of source code, and a table of 48 steps, properly rounded, and another paragraph in the white paper...

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2in8fv/why_did_satoshi_implement_drastic_halving/