One last question. What is the emission / inflation rate of monero and where does it end? currently at 11.8m according to coincap...will it go higher than that?
The base supply for variable rewards (each block pays out a tiny fraction of the remaining base supply, so as a result the block reward continuously decline slowly) is about 18.4 million. Once the reward reaches a minimum of 0.3/minute (0.6 per block given the current 2 minute blocks, though that could change) it will stay there forever. In theory this means the total supply is infinite, but once it reaches the 0.3/minute level the rate of growth will be very slow, <1% per year.
The first page says this...
[2] Initial number of atomic units is M = 2^64 - 1. However, once the block reward reaches 0.3 XMR per minute (sometime in 2022) that is treated as the minimum subsidy, which means that Monero's total emission will forever increase by ~157680 XMR annually.
So M = 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 ? I'm not understanding something there...
Yes, but with the caveat that the "atomic unit" of Monero is 1e-12 XMR, so M = 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 atomic units = 18,446,744.073... XMR
