In order to fairly implement an emission curve change, we need to retroactively adjust everything mined up to that point. If we don't, it's an instamine where the early adopters changed the rules in the middle of the game to benefit themselves. But on the other hand, a retroactive adjustment means miners/buyers/sellers all made decisions on false information. This is why there were a lot of complaints about "taking my coins away" earlier.
So the most agreeable thing to do is to leave the curve as it is. About 8 years from now, we'll have a problem where the block reward is fairly small and miner don't mine for nothing. The solution to that is to implement a minimum subsidy. This would cause a sub-1% inflation that decreases over time and keeps miners happy to ensure network security. tacotime will probably implement this in hard fork in the near future.
Thanks eizh for explaining, I missed this news that this was what was decided.
Well the pool on the forum failed to get a majority but there is zero protection against ballot stuffing with newbie accounts so who knows what that really means. If we had a voting mechanism in the coin itself we could use that to get a more reliable vote, but we don't.
I do agree there is a widespread objection about either taking coins away or giving early miners an unfair advantage, so it likely best to just leave it the way it is and implement a longer term fix to the somewhat overly fast curve over the scale of years/decades as eizh mentioned.
Can this be resolved with something like slowly moving the block target to 2 or 2.5 or x minutes over the course of a few years? At this point, it would probably be much more favorable to come up with long-term, barely visible solutions rather than shocks. I don't know the protocol though -- you guys do so I'm probably just making it harder than it needs to be. It sounds like you're in favor of somehting like this too.
I get what you're saying about ballot stuffing, lots of new accounts in this thread.
I understand the need to have a correction, but is there any way to cause it to appear as a crawl rather than a shock? I'd rather lose a miniscule amount every day rather than rip out a tooth all at once . . if possible.