It is annoying to constantly answer the question what the total amount of Ether(eum) will be. There will be no final amount.
I created this thread to show how many Ether will be created in the next 100 years. Year 0 = 2015.
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As you see, there are created exactly 15,626,576 Ether each year (it is 26% of the originally created 60,102,216 Ether).
Technically incorrect, PoW difficulty increases exponentially after 1 year, causing the block interval to increase and block creation to essentially cease. Before then a hard fork is to be issued, likely to PoS / Casper. No details are set in stone, however a 1500 coin staking minimum has been suggested. The PoS monetary policy is TBD, could be tx fees + inflation or processing fees only, subject to security considerations.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/410ifx/so_is_the_number_of_ethereum_coins_going_to_be/cyz08woThis is essentially what I have written in my post but I see that people keep with their own false opinions!
From:
https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/08/04/ethereum-protocol-update-1/Difficulty adjustment scheme
A lot of you have been wondering how we would implement a switch from PoW to PoS in time for Serenity. This will be handled by the newly introduced difficulty adjustment scheme, which elegantly guarantees a hard-fork point in the next 16 months.
It works as follow: starting from block 200,000 (very roughly 17 days from now), the difficulty will undergo an exponential increase which will only become noticeable in about a year. At that point (just around the release of the Serenity milestone), well see a significant increase in difficulty which will start pushing the block resolution time upwards.
So, a year on, the network will continue to be useful for roughly 3-4 months, but eventually will reach an Ice Age of sorts: the difficulty will simply be too high for anyone to find a block. This will allow us to introduce PoS, perhaps via Casper, if it proves itself.
A simple calculation takes you that this POS change will be introduced somewhere in December of 2016. You can all calculate how many Ethers we will have until this date