Dogecoin Bitcoin Litecoin
  2015	5.26%	 10%	 33.33%
  2016	5% 	 9.09%	 12.5%
  2017	4.76%	 4.1%	 11.11%
  2018	4.54%	 4%	 10%
  2019	4.35%	 3.85%	 9.09%
  2020	4.2%	 3.7%	 4.1%

EDIT before someone jumps down my throat I am checking the numbers now and the bitcoin one looks to be slightly off, please take this as close, but not exact please. If you have the exact numbers pass them on and I will update.

Especially considering that XDG is barely a few months old, that this decision won't impact anything before the whole 100 billion are mined (which is years from now) and that due to the open source nature of the software the decision can be trivially reversed should the community decide otherwise.

If so, how is dogecoin going to create five billion USD per year via coin buyers to pay for its inflation?

Unless it means something else and I am missing the point?

Also, "to the moon" is a dogecoin reddit joke, it doesn't mean anything in particular

To the moon is simultaneously the moon and the path to the moon.

In the dogecoin community it's a statement that carries an element of self-parody.

Before this announcement, there were only ever going to be 100 billion dogecoin in existence. Now they just decided that they want a 5 billion doge inflation rate per annum, Thereby decreasing the the value of each dogecoin.

Its somewhat similar to the way that the federal reserve pumps money into the market to increase the flow of capital, the dogecoin foundation wants to increase the flow of dogecoin by increasing the supply and access and decreasing the incentive to hoard.

edit the code was already written to be inflationary. The plan was to implement a 100 billion cap in some future version. They scrapped that plan.

Never thought I'd find myself calling a distributed cryptocurrency surprisingly democractic...

For example, take Bitcoin after the cap has been reached and mining bitcoins only gives fees. If 50% of miners cooperate to make blocks worth real bitcoins again, they will suddenly start raking in more profit. They will be devaluing everyone's stores of bitcoins to do it, but people who hold bitcoins have no say in it, only computing power does. If we assume that miners will be the main owners of bitcoins for all eternity then they will probably never agree to this, but if there are a lot of miners with very little in reserve then why wouldn't they accept devaluing bitcoins a little bit to get more per block mined?

There is a reason William Gibson stopped doing straight sci-fi.

Not really; inflation is built into the code and getting everyone to "upgrade" would be difficult.

The idea in the github thread seems to be that the 5% inflation should approximately cancel out the unknown loss of coins that would be going on.

I'm assuming you meant to say 40 billion.

If the blockchain this happened on was serious business you would probably see mass abandonment.

Yeah.

>If the blockchain this happened on was serious business you would probably see mass abandonment.

The hard-currency fanatics would run. But where would they go?

Is there compelling evidence that inflation discourages hoarding? I don't think anyone would agree that USD-centric societies discourage hoarding, unless you think something like investing in mutual funds doesn't fit the term.

No offense, but I think it would be wise to familiarize yourself with the basics of a subject before forming high-confidence blanket opinions about it like that. (The same applies to your other comment about why anyone would think an inflationary economic policy would be desirable at all.)

Sorry if I sound patronizing, but as it happens the link between inflation and hoarding is one of the few well-established empirical facts in economics [1,2,3] with ample historical evidence both from the well-documented shortage effects of price controls [4], to the well-understood effect of changes in bond yields on the money demand [5], which is the cornerstone mechanism of basic monetary policy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding_(economics)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation

[3] Milton Friedman once said: "We economists don't know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can't sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you'll have a tomato shortage. It's the same with oil or gas." From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_controls.

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_controls

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_policy#Policy_tools

High-confidence blanket statement? I was asking a question. The opinion in question was poorly worded-- I understand that inflation means money either loses value or must be reinvested in the economy. I just don't think that inflation prevents a wealth incumbency (which I inappropriately referred to as "hoarding").

> (The same applies to your other comment about why anyone would think an inflationary economic policy would be desirable at all.)

I was referring to how the protocols have an identical economic policy (majority rules), not to inflation vs. deflation as economic policy (which I stated explicitly).

I was mainly curious about whether or not inflation vs. deflation matters in terms of preventing a rich-get-richer society. My admittedly poorly worded question seems to have given many HNers an opportunity to feel good about letting me know they understand a classical economic concept.

If you _invest_, you're either buying a productive asset, or storing something valuable for a period of time, or giving money to some other business to spend on equipment, employees etc. in the hope of future return.

Whether this will hold with dogecoin remains to be seen but is somewhat logical.

One is productive, one isn't. That's the key difference.

The difference is even more glaringly obvious if you think about the difference between equity in a productive company, loans to productive organizations, and simply doing nothing.