The Tail Emission Debate on Bitcoin

[mu_enrico]

Discussions on the Internet, regarding whether tail emissions are necessary, have become hot after Peter Todd tweeted an article about the tail emission on his blog:



Link to blog article: https://petertodd.org/2022/surprisingly-tail-emission-is-not-inflationary

What is tail emission?
It's fixed block rewards and exists forever.

Because there are many mathematical formulas, I won't dig deeper into that, but here's the gist of it:
- There is currently no blockchain that can survive relying on transaction fees alone, and there is an opinion that using transaction fees alone is not stable, so the system still needs block subsidies (part of the block rewards that are halved roughly every 4 years)
- The total circulating supply of BTC won't be ~21 Million but will be less because there are coins that are lost every year due to accidents, private keys lost, and so on. This is a deflation scenario when the circulating supply keeps decreasing.
- Using tail emission, there won't be a deflation scenario, because the additional new coins minted will be proportional to the coins lost in each period.

Actually, this is an old issue. It just got brought up again and then it gets attention again. For those who haven't had time to comment in the past: What do you think about this idea? Is it useful for BTC? And is it possible to apply the tail emission to BTC?