Becoin: the 21 mil. cap is a different issue because Bitcoin was set up from the very start to divorce the issuance rate from resources expended by anyone. However much miners may toil, they can not significantly affect the amount of BTC issued during any given timeframe, and that's how it was from day one. (you know the caveats that apply, I'm sure.)

I put it to you that what the miners produce isn't BTC, it's the processing of transactions. I think you'll find my assertion is backed up by pretty much everything going back to the original whitepaper.

To reiterate: While changing the issuance cap is possible, everything down to the difficulty balancing shows the cap is a fundamentally hardcoded feature of BTC that isn't meant to be subject to market forces, and this is known by all participants in the economy. A cap on TX rates, instead, is a new development and a direct attempt to control the miners business practices.

Although it is widely believed that Satoshi was an inflation-hating goldbug he never said this, and in fact programmed Bitcoin's money supply to grow indefinitely, forever. He modeled the monetary supply as 4 gold mines being discovered per mibillenium (1024 years), with equal intervals between them, each one being depleted over the course of 140 years.

This poses obvious problems, however. Prominent among them is the discussion on what to call 1 billion Bitcoin, which symbol color to use for it, and when wallet clients should switch to it by default.

To combat this, this document proposes a controversial change: making Bitcoin's monetary supply finite.

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Given the moderate time frame over which this change is to be implemented, we expect all miners to choose to screw themselves and deploy this change before 2214.

If they don't, and a minority remains on the old code base, a fork may occur. Essentially, they'll be mining fool's gold after that time.