people seem very evasive about the number of coins that will be minted?
You are funny. All your questions are for to calculate market cap and make some short term trade on a coin you know nothing or care about.
You don't care enough to read the whitepaper. You don't skim through the thread. You are not trying to understand that this is not an altcoin
trading game coin. But to answer your ?.
Siacoins that will be mined goes down by one every block until it reaches 30k per block. After that it will always mine 30k I guess forever.
That is because Siacoin is for renting storage and for mostly businesses to store all their cloud data cheaper and more reliable than centralized services.
Siacoin is a currency for storage usage so the ultimate value and price will be decided by the demand for its storage.
Siacoin allows a little boy in Alaska to use his 4TB hdd he got for Christmas to sell his space to Netflix who will use all of Sia's thousands of storage providers to store their content cheaper than Amazon. And for Mr. Smith who used to put his videos of himself naked making muscle poses on google drive until he got paranoid that it takes only one google employee to allow a hacker to gain access to his account and upload his video where if you put it in Sia, even the hosters don't know what they are storing so you only trust Sia the protocol which is open source.
Why have torrents anymore when there is Sia. Why should those guys who upload movies for free use file hosting sites when he can now use Sia?
Siacoin will be improved and tested like Bitcoin. If you trust your money to Bitcoin you will trust Sia for your data.
If your community didn't care about trading the coin then maybe it shouldn't move to get on the biggest trading sites in altcoins....