My point is that you cannot separate the economic aspects from the proposed way of solving double spending with the whole PoW system as if you lived in a vacuum. In order for the project to be functional in the real world it would need to grow from the economic pov otherwise all the code would be useless, thus why both are interrelated and why I find it interesting that there are 0 mentions of it on the whitepaper.
Of course you can. I mean, that's precisely what satoshi did, isn't it?
To be more precise, the
specifics -- ie. currency rate and final supply -- of how currency issuance takes place is largely irrelevant. Arbitrary. An accidental property. Otherwise we wouldn't see so many diverse approaches at currency issuance rates which all achieve more or less the same.
The only important bits are (a) that currency is decentrally issued and (b) that securing the network is incentivized. That's all that was needed to be mentioned at that point in time, so that's all there is:
By convention, the first transaction in a block is a special transaction that starts a new coin owned
by the creator of the block. This adds an incentive for nodes to support the network, and provides
a way to initially distribute coins into circulation, since there is no central authority to issue them.
[...]
The incentive may help encourage nodes to stay honest. If a greedy attacker is able to
assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it
to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to
find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than
everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth.
That's what he did, what I argue is that you cannot leave it to completely arbitrary numbers and expect the project to be a success. I doubt satoshi punched the keyboard and whatever numbers were typed that's what he used for total supply, block rewards and whatnot.
If for instance he decided to set the thing similar to Freicoin, which was inflationary and introduced the idea of "digital demurring", Bitcoin would have never caught up as a store of value, which coupled with the blocksize limitation, it would have been a failure. In fact, I suspect satoshi knew 1MB blocksize was set in stone years before it even was brought up by anyone else. The way I see it is that those things are "hard coded" in practice, but not mentioned in a explicit way. He was aware on the game theory that would unfold.