Subsidies are great if you want to get applicants who qualify, It should be called a subsidiary not a reward for good reason, the problem is there are developers who feel the economics are wrong and Bitcoin needs to be fixed, I may not be able to express why but to my understanding the mechanism seems well balanced and considered in my view, the onus is on the people who have a problem with how Bitcoin works to prove its broken, and build a better mousetrap not change this one.
My position is that it would be great if we could have started Bitcoin up without a block subsidy, but since the currency has to be issued via some method, and since the only way to produce a truly optimal initial distribution would require an entity that was both omnipotent and omniscient, issuing the currency via block subsidy spread out over time is the least terrible way to do it.
It's in my queue of articles that need to be written.
I like Satoshi's quote on this:
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Coins have to get initially distributed somehow, and a constant rate seems like the best formula.
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http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography%40metzdowd.com/msg09979.htmlThe nonchalance, to me, indicates a nice trust in markets to do their job of optimizing allocation over time. But - if Bitcoin ever starts to become a serious global economic force, mainstream economists are going to flip out over the above quote, given the initial-distribution algo didn't go through some deep analysis, etc...
I think it's interesting how the engineering decision of making a simple/transparent (easy to implement, thus more secure) distribution algorithm trumped any potential detailed economic complexity, presumably due to Satoshi's understanding that the market would eventually allocate the capital optimally anyways, given the transparency of the current and future supply.