Hm, our conversation seems to have moved away from being centered around Monero itself and is now toward addressing fundamental economic theories. Anyone that has contributed so far, has my attention ... specifically for the fact that you even have an opinion on the matter. That's rare enough right now.
Anyways, I'm going to make a point that I've tried to make before in the past .. that I didn't at the time have the ability to unfold even a little bit. I mentioned that value must be able to be stored into a currency, to a point. It cannot flow too fast outward, nor should the value pour into the currency too fast else there will be major over-concentrations of value.
Before I go into it, my views of inflation can be understood rather well by this article:
http://www.drlwilson.com/Articles/INFLATON.htm . Specifically, if you think constantly increasing the money supply (exponential growth) in order to target an inflation is the most acceptable thing to do, please consider the largely ineffective, even possibly detrimental, tool used most recently by a group of relatively intelligent people: Quantitative Easing.
These people have been thinking about these problems of "wealth concentration" for much longer than us here at Monero (them years-decades, us a month), they are more than us and are much better equipped to actually put the tool to work than us. They still came up with something that didn't work. That's why I say we go with what's worked for 6000 years, a constant supply (effectually a constant depreciating inflation, an exponential decay of debasement being added yearly) of "money" until someone or some group of people has a much better picture of the situation at hand. Just because the understood inflation rate of gold can be reported to be as high as 2.5% (I've personally found numbers closer to 1.5%) does not mean it's been historically that high. I would rather think it's been historically lower, much lower than even 1.5% ... but perhaps someone will be great enough to provide me proof of either?
Continuing this argument, allow me to make an idiotically simplistic strainer analogy. Consider a situation where you are trying to fill up your strainer under a kitchen faucet. In this comparison, the water itself is value, the flow of the water is a variable we can never be able to predict (and the main reason I say we stick with what's worked for 6k years, and go w/ constant supply) is the speed at which value flows into this simplistic economic system. The size (or number) of the holes is the targeted inflation you want, and the size of the strainer is comparable to constant supply (where the height of the container itself grows constantly).
What I think we want is a situation where we can fill the strainer to the brim, without overflow and without the strainer being totally empty. When you say things like 5% inflation could be necessary ... well I think that's a situation that won't hold water .. too many holes. On the opposite hand, keeping the number of holes the same ... while increasing the actual size of the strainer will give the ability to hold more water over time (while also having a form of debasement, though less relative to the amount in existence today). The balance between the two can only be reached with an accurate understanding of the faucet and the speed at which it will likely pass your strainer water, and exactly how many holes we need as well as the height of the walls at any particular time. We are in a point where we don't have a clue where this is leading, thus my previous stance that either of the most likely situations will give adequate time in which the issue may be solved.
Specifically, I have to believe that wealth must concentrate to a point (the brim), else the entire system loses value too quickly (out the holes). We will end up in a situation where, one day in the future, in under 24 hours the entire money supply existing today will be created in less than an instant with un-damped exponential growth that would be invited with a constant inflation.
I realize that this is probably a miserable analogy, and I think it's been better attributed to dilution of a fluid ... but I was just so excited. Either way, I'm focusing on the micro scale of the viewpoint of one
person wallet (indicating that wealth may concentrate because one person may have multiple wallets) -- while I feel the fluid dilution analogy would be better at describing the system as a whole
I still maintain that the creation of a damped harmonic function, by combining an exponential decay (constant supply) with an exponential growth (constant inflation) of supply will be the only correct solution to this. I also maintain that the exponential decay (of increased money supply) model achieved through constant supply has worked for 6000 years, and can provide the historical basis to most likely work until a correct solution is discovered.