Quote from: Anon136 on October 02, 2014, 06:54:19 PM

Quote from: rpietila on October 02, 2014, 03:16:20 PM

but more importantly - and this is a coin killer - the emission will run its course to the point that XMR will considered to be a "community premine" despite all our ~~good~~ heroic efforts

This may be wrong but I think there is a pretty reasonable chance that it isnt, so this is an important insight I think. Also something I had not thought of myself, so thanks for bringing that up.

My apriori ideas on emissions:

Bitcoin emission curve is quite long, it is not a bad model.
Flat emission curve may also work, who knows?

However I critique:
These are both arbitrary decisions that are entirely uninfluenced by external factors. They are inflexible. They do not respond to economic realities, demographics, usage, mining security, or anything else that might reasonably be expected to have some influence on money supply.

Further:
The emission is something that does not have very good precedent for alterations. A debate on what would be the optimal emission, and to get that right forevermore, it is not likely to be something merely arbitrarily decided, picked out of a hat and made permanent. That is just guessing and is no better than Bitcoin or Ether.

I do agree with rpietila about one thing for certain. At some time in the future there will be an exit from Bitcoin for something better. XMR is the best there is at the moment for such an option, and it improves daily. I am not under the illusion that it is perfect, but to change something there should be very excellent reasons not just to change it, but to what it ought be changed.

With respect to emissions, I am sure that I don't know the answer to what the optimal emission rate is at this time, but I do think that it is worthy of serious examination. I do not think that this discussion should be in the context of "What to do with XMR emission". I would rather it be in the context of a potential merge-mined coin, using the same XMR codebase and advancements. This accomplishes four important things

1) It enables the discussion
2) There should not be uncertainty about whether what you have is going to be diluted more than what you thought when you bought it.
3) Prevent "extra work" for our development team.
4) Provide additional revenue for our miners through the merge-mining, Miners thereby mine both coins simultaneously for the same work, thus increasing incentives for mining XMR (and the potential discussion coin would have good mining before it even was delivered).

Milton Friedman also argued that money supply ought be mechanistically determined, not by human decision but by formula, it was one of his criticisms of The Fed Reserve and central banking generally.

The block chain has some information that can used to sense the economic environment of the world around it. Difficulty, transaction volume, and etc. There may be other things that it can detect. This would be my starting points, there may be other metrics it can offer that it currently does not (when smart contracts are more popular for example, there could be a basket of commodities or something to pull real-world value data into the analysis).