I think before any proposal could be made for altering the inflation schedule an analysis of the current schedule could be carried out what was the reasoning
The schedule was based on non-merged mining which requires creating enough incentive for miners to mine enough to secure the coin. That dynamic changed significantly with merged mining because the coin will be mined anyway, even with a small mining schedule (e.g. doge) because whatever subsidy is still free money to the miner as they dont have to expend any extra resources to merge mine an infinite number of coins.
Translation: at the beginning VIA had to endure the negative effect of high inflation to secure the network (= giving miners enough incentive to mine VIA)...since merge mining this is
no longer true. We can significantly reduce inflation without risking blockchain security.
Well the question was is there a paper of some kind? Drak didn't give an answer. I accept what's being said about the change in mining but where's the analysis technical review or whatever you want to call it past, present and future.
You can't just make adhoc changes like this without it smacking of an attempt to pump the price, I totally agree with Draks sentiment that it requires consultation peer review and whatever along with something provided to review (explain exactly why, what and when to change).
I also agree with other Viacoiners that development or the lack of it requires attention. Drak you're doing great with the development at you're end but the community is really not performing, self included.
Concerns are being expressed that nothing appears to be being developed on the protocol how would altering the coin supply change that?
"Viacoin is designed from the ground up to be both a digital currency and provide the backbone of ClearingHouse protocol" -
http://blog.viacoin.org/2014/07/05/what-is-viacoin.html merged mining was partly to increase viacoin blockchain security making the protocol more robust and suitable as an alternative to development on the bitcoin blockchain which is considered slow and restrictive and there's the spam effect.
Increased security for Viacoin was identified as a requirement for not least Fintech services such as those being built by Overstock and others.
"reduce inflation without risking blockchain security" sounds great but for what purpose other than to pump some short-sighted life into Viacoin for the coffers of whom "sit silent without answer concerns of this community watching how this drama unfold"
There is no "paper" in particular other than what has been written about on the blog: Viacoin's original remit was to be a platform for fast embedded consensus protocols and in general to contribute to the greater good in this space. Where there have been extensions, those have been written up separately, like with BIP65, checklocktimeverify.
I generally do not support the idea of changing the coin schedule, but since it was brought up, I am saying I am in no position to dictate what happens, the only time you'll see a veto from me is if there is some kind of technical issue. By veto I mean refusing to merge a patch in the Viacoin Core repository, remembering that anyone can release a fork, although again, consensus critical changes are more difficult to convince the ecosystem to adopt. We did succeed with merged mining hard fork and that changed the dynamics for all the smaller miners and pools that were involved in the beginning.
So all I can offer up is my reasoning for the mining schedule at genesis. Block rewards main purpose is to encourage PoW miners to secure Viacoin. Merged mining changes the dynamics, take DOGE for example there are now only 10,000 DOGE per block, that;s about 0.006BTC, but it is still merged mined because it can be done so for free. For miners that's a bonus because they can mine LTC and get extra rewards for all the merged mined coins they simultaneously mine. As such, if the coin is merged mined, the security of the network wont be affected by a change to the block reward schedule as it would if it was normal PoW mining.
If some new PoS algo came along that worked for example, the block rewards could literally drop to zero and the network run off fees.
This is really the last I have to say on the matter, please dont ask me any more questions as I do not *personally* support changing any fundamental settings of the coin, but just like happened with Merged Mining, there was overwhelming community support for it, and the viacoin ecosystem agreed to make the change. That's how it works. Even better, if someone wants to propose a change formally, they are welcome to make a pull request and garner support. This is the same way it works upstream in Bitcoin Core, so no different down here.