Or they would link to this again Emission rate of Grin - #88 by igno.peverell
I’m not sure what’s so confusing about the emission schedule. It wasn’t a “mistake” that anyone would have to admit, it’s an experiment that has to run for decades to see if it failed or not. Even if it fails, you simply declare it a failed experiment, there’s not much to “admit” really. The fact that the community shrinked is a thing that’s outside of the protocol or the experiment itself. Sure, it’d be nice to have more devs, but the protocol wouldn’t have a ton more shiny features even if we had them. It would have more network effect though, which is important, but I’m not convinced most of us would change the emission for this.
Regarding fairness, it is about mathematical equality. For that, you need equal numbers somewhere. You can do it in at least two ways:
- Have equal value emission e.g. 5 coins per block
- Have equal value inflation e.g. 2%
I think both are interesting and 2., as mentioned already, would need a premine or a transition after some time. Grin chose 1., with a trick that it set the number of coins to equal the expected number of seconds to find a block. It thus works as an approximation of a counter that counts seconds passed since the genesis block. If you do the math, you’ll see you get a fairly good approximation despite a slowly mined block after genesis, a reorg due to inflation and a DAA with slower adaptation than we have today. There’s a reason Satoshi referred to his construction as timechain, it’s because blocks follow time and come in approximate time intervals of 10 minutes in case of Bitcoin. If you sync block issuance with block time, you get a time-synced asset. If you know of a better (more precise?) decentralized and trustless clock-based issued asset, do share.