Alway good to re-post this one...
Recently many people asked questions about the calculation and supply of Siacoins. Many people actually have misconception of Siacoin’s supply and calculation. I am reposting a post about Siacoin’s supply I wrote couples of months ago and hope it is helpful to some poeple.
In Sia FAQ - "The number of siacoins created each block is (300,000 - height). The genesis block has a height of 0. After height 270,000, all blocks will have a reward of 30,000 siacoins. The current number of siacoins can be found at explore.siacoin.com"
Right now (March 26th, 2016) the Sia block height is 43,049. So it will need about another 4.3 years((270,000-43,049)/(144365)=4.3years) to hit the 270,000 block height to start the 30,000 coins constant rewards. In about 4.3 years when sia hits the 270,000 block height, there will be about 44.55 billion (((300,000+30,000)/2)270,000=44.55 billion) siacoins available in the market. From there, there will be about 1.57 billion (30,000144365=1.5678 billion) of siacoins coming out from the mining every year constantly. So in 5 years from today, there will be about 45.6 billion of siacoins available. In 10 years from today, there will be about 53.5 billion of siacoins available in the market.
I think Siacoin's inflation is not high. 5 years from now, the inflation is about 3.4%. 10 years from now, the inflation will be about 2.9%. 20 years from now is about 2.2%. In the long run, the inflation will be about 2% for long time. So in the long run, the inflation rate will probably be lower than the Sia network growth rate besides the lost coins.
In return, Sia gets a robust and secured network and Sia can focus on the long term growth of its business and ecosystem. Siacoin’s value eventually will depend on people's expectation on the growth of the business and ecosystem on Sia network. So once the market figures out the proper marketcap of Sia, we will see the real price of the Siacoins.
In v1.2.0, Sia will implement a host Proof of Burn mechanism in which hosts have to burn certain siacoins to show that they are real and sincere for business to counter the sybil attack. When Sia network is getting mature, the estimate annual burned siacoins can be 0.1% to 0.5% of total available siacoins. The burned siacoins will offset the inflation in the long run. At some point, it could result in a deflation of siacoins.
Here is also a Siacoin’s supply chart (by the courtesy of siapulse.com) -
http://siapulse.com/page/marketIn addition, research has indicated Bitcoin will be unstable when its block reward ends in the future -
http://freedom-to-tinker.com/2016/10/21/bitcoin-is-unstable-without-the-block-reward/ and
http://randomwalker.info/publications/mining_CCS.pdf . Sia won't have this problem in the future.
"So perhaps designers of new cryptocurrencies should make the block reward permanent and accept monetary inflation as inevitable. Transaction fees would still exist, but merely as an incentive for miners to include transactions in their blocks."
