Quote from: barrett_fire on August 12, 2018, 12:18:18 PM

Quote from: FLHippy on August 12, 2018, 12:12:33 PM

Hello,
I would like to ask you how many total Ethers will exist? I can´t find this information and it seems that number of Ethers will be unlimited? So Ethereum is created to be deflation currency? And what will happen when we switch the consensus to Proof of Stake? Many people will earn free Ethers and many people will want to sell they earned Ethers. So for me it seems that Ether will be cheaper and cheaper in the future.
What is your opinion, please?

I don't understand it all that much, but I found a Quora question about it: https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-limit-to-the-supply-of-Ethereum. It seems like there is no actual limit. Here's a quote from the founder, Vitalik Buterin:

Quote

So here is a thought. Currently, because of the PoW ice age, the block time is scheduled to start increasing in mid-2017, and past around 2019 the increase is going to grow exponentially. The mining reward does NOT increase proportionately. Hence, there is already an exponential slowdown in the growth of the ETH supply built into the protocol; my script shows:

Block 3000000, approx ETH supply 87962556, time '2017-01-16 00:38:33.067775' blocktime 14.86
Block 3500000, approx ETH supply 90612556, time '2017-04-11 18:09:34.273529' blocktime 15.27
Block 4000000, approx ETH supply 93262556, time '2017-08-15 18:20:24.642729' blocktime 30.01
Block 4500000, approx ETH supply 95912556, time '2018-11-03 05:55:48.912370' blocktime 136.71
Block 5000000, approx ETH supply 98562556, time '2025-10-02 11:47:30.658317' blocktime 835.81
Block 5500000, approx ETH supply 101212556, time '2128-03-20 09:14:16.483692' blocktime 17183.83
Block 6000000, approx ETH supply 103862556, time '5189-09-26 20:57:59.367004' blocktime 520901.19

Hence, in the foreseeable future, the supply will not go far above 100 million.

Basically the difficultly of Ethereum just increases exponentially. This means that even though there is technically no limit, the mining difficulty will basically put a natural cap on in. Blocktimes will be so long long that there will hardly be any increase.

Thank you for explanation! This information I have also found. So technically unlimited but thanks to the difficulty it will be very hard to mine new coins, right? But what will happen when they switch into Proof of Stake, the reward for staking will be very low? It also makes no sense.