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.