40,960,000 coins issued through stake tickets is a lot. My opinion is let the demand determine the supply. But it can reach a return on investment if the inflation rate from mining is kept low. These are just my opinions and everyone is free to have their own.
Cunicula was originally in favour of stemming the initial issuance to a period of 10 years. In the paper, it's described as 27 years to 1%, after which the inflation of the supply because to increase exponentially (but slowly), similar to fiat but slower. This will make mining continually attractive, because it does not rely on fees. Mainly it's designed to to supplement Bitcoin as a goto point inbetween that of equity and actual fiat (in response to criticisms like
these), and indeed, with the decentralized reserve system, intends to have an in place public oracle system to hold fiat within the chain itself.
Time-to-1% inflation (TT1%?) can be tweaked to whatever, so if you guys want a faster distribution, this can be done. Initial issuance must also be tweaked if you want it to stay at a 3%/10y target. It is a delicate issue though; adjusting decreases in inflation so that they occur very rapidly can lead to accusations of a ponzi scheme e.g. protoshares.
Fear of accusations shouldn't determine what we do though. In my opinion if there is inflation it must be for some specific purpose other than to avoid bad publicity.
If the argument you're making is that less people would want to use it as a currency if it's deflationary, this is a valid argument. I think different people will be attracted to deflationary currencies and that deflationary currencies may actually have many positive benefits.
One positive benefit that I postulate is a reduction in crime. A lot of crime is out of desperation or out of competition. Violence over turf happens among drug dealers often because in inflationary currencies the idea of saving doesn't make sense. You're punished for saving in an inflationary currency and I postulate that this encourages the thug capitalist mentality where short term profits rule.
If you want to promote long term thinking, long term investment, saving, and reduce violent crime I believe one way of approaching the problem is to offer a deflationary currency to allow people to think not just about day to day profit but the next year, the next decade, and not to spend all their money down so fast.
I use the street criminal as the individual in this metaphor because in American society the street criminal is the purest capitalist. Inflationary currencies encourage crime because why would anyone want to make and spend money slowly, or save money, when they can spend it as soon as they earn it and never save a penny? As a result of not saving this keeps the street criminal as an individual in a state of always being on a tread mill, or always struggling to stay afloat, and as a result it promotes a kind of ruthless competitiveness.
Let's take it out of the street level, how about it's stock investors? If you have a stock which dilutes over time then it requires that people keep buying it. The faster the rate of dilution the more people will have to find money to keep investing to maintain their position. This is like trying to keep up with the Joneses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_up_with_the_Joneses and in my opinion is a problem which would not exist if people were encouraged to think about long term investments.
Protoshares has it's problems because it over relies on prediction markets. The developer seems to believe that prediction markets will solve all of societies ills. But a lot of changes have been made to the design since the time when Cunicula called it a ponzi scheme. I don't think it's a ponzi scheme at this time, but if people wanted to make a case for it being a ponzi scheme or pyramid scheme the truth is you could make the same case against Bitcoin.
1. Bitcoin itself is not decentralized. It's actually controlled by a mining cartel. This mining cartel controls the hashing power of the network. For this mining cartel because they make the chips we use to mine with, if Bitcoin were to inflate forever they would not mind because they are closer to the generation of new coins and stand to benefit from inflation. It is this same attitude in my opinion which leads people to believe inflation for the dollar is helpful, it helps only the people who are close to the creation of new dollars because the initial distribution goes to those people.
As a result of the centralization of both Bitcoin and the fiat currencies as well we could say they are both pyramid schemes which benefit (certain people) most the people who control the production capability behind the currency generation of the network. At this point Bitshares is looking like it will be more decentralized than Bitcoin just as Bitcoin is more decentralized than the USD, because they switched away from mining and moved into a transaction based proof of stake which allows for them to both minimize inflation while increasing decentralization. I will say this has not been proven in practice so it's entirely theoretical, we have to wait and see.
2. We have to in my opinion measure or quantify the level of decentralization and as a principle agree that greater levels of decentralization is better. This should apply to Bitshares, Bitcoin, Netcoin, we want to have some way that generation of new coins or shares is decentralized. Netcoin is in a position where it can easily be more decentralized than Bitcoin provided that it's hard enough to mine, but if it cannot resist centralization around it's mining then whatever that inflation rate is, whether it be 1% or 4%, it will ultimately be a tax on anyone who saves in Netcoin. So if that 1% tax or 4% tax to miners goes to securing the network or paying miners I would say that sort of inflation has a purpose but if mining becomes centralized then that 1% to 4% tax goes to the same few people who basically will use their influence to maintain high inflation rates forever because they now have a coin faucet which pays them at the expense of everyone else in the network.
3. I believe deflation has more social benefits than inflation. I haven't seen anyone make a case for the social benefits of inflation. Inflation is always promoted as if it's some kind of necessary evil. It's usually spun up by economists that if the currency does not inflate then people will hoard (save) too much money and the economy will grind to a halt. This hoarding in my opinion only happens if a currency is too centralized. If it's decentralized in the initial distribution then since no one is going to become a trillionaire there is no massive wealth disparity argument. Instead you could end up with lots of millionaires who saved for years, but the social impact of that isn't the same as the social impact of a few people becoming trillionaires. So it seems to me that over centralization is what makes inflation or deflation bad. If anyone can mine and earn a reasonable amount of coins or shares then there is no real complaint with deflation.
4. Proof of Work seems to be the main problem behind all of this. We need a better Proof of Work which rewards work which is actually valuable to society, or we will have to move away from Proof of Work in the current form. I don't think Bitshares has completely solved it with going to Proof of Stake and I don't think Proof of Work as it is now is very good either. Proof of Work right now generates an effort with minimal to no social utility, all of that computing power essentially goes to waste, we have to make Proof of Work both economically and socially useful. We have to also make sure it's as decentralized as possible and by decentralized I mean resistant on the social network level as well so that it resists the formation of mining or other kinds of cartels to try to control the hashing power.
Some of my ideas on how we might be able to do it, the idea of the mining lottery is a good metaphor and perhaps is a direction if we keep mining. This would make mining a bit less predictable for the miner in a good way because it would decentralize the power dynamics in such a way that any random person could hit the jackpot while mining. It would also create some disassociation between hashing power and the reward by adding an element of uncertainty.
It should also be that we can create some disassociation between how much money a person spends and how much power the person gets. Money alone should not be the deciding factor in Proof of X. I think in the case of Bitshares money is the deciding factor but that is because they are treating it as a decentralized autonomous corporation so it has to be focused around profit. I think you can easily create a DAC which focuses on profit but do the crowd funding donation in such a way that money isn't the only way to mine or send value. For example perhaps you can donate computing power, money, or anything to the network to earn credits/shares.
I don't have the solution I'm just presenting some directions to explore and trying to encourage a high level debate on strategy.