Emission rate of Grin

What happens to these lost Grin coins? Will they forever be frozen in the Blockchain as unspent coins?

Yes, they remain forever in the UTXO set. In this sense the UTXO set will grow proportionally in the number of transactions rather than the number of active participants.

amount of Grin in circulation will greatly increase?
Is that good or bad for Grin as a currency?

Neither, since multiplying emission by a constant has no effect on the economics.

Deflation being necessary for a medium to be useful as a store of value is unproven speculation.
Gold being the longest used form of store of value is the obvious counterexample (gold is inflationary). I believe the history of fiat shows that an exponentially increasing supply is the best form of currency.

I believe this is potentially dangerous thinking and was the primary reason I proposed a few of the questions in my first post.

It is hard to compare the inflationary nature of government fiat with a simple hard coded emission rate of a cryptocurrency. A better way to ask the “best form of money” question might be: Does a money supply need to increase with the economy? If the answer is yes and we’re not talking about a smarter algorithm for adjusting the emission rate dynamically, is it a discussion worth having?


I believe that would be impossible short of gai, or cheatible.

If you stated that the block reward was connected to the growth of the utxo set, a miner cartel could just grow the utxo set; for example.

I agree. I think the inflationary arguments for a currency that requires bootstrapping (crypto) are misguided. We don’t have an algorithmic federal reserve controlling the monetary supply based on economic data so why pretend crypto has similar properties.

In my mind, capturing market cap through speculative means is the only known way to successfully bootstrap a coin. Some thought should be put into these variables rather than assuming they have no impact.

The total supply of grin will be ∞
But first we’ll overflow 2^64 in the year 2603. Please mark your calendar…

Can we make it future proof and use big numbers?

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It’s a planned upgrade for year 2500.


Alright, well… I asked Dumbledore about deep sleep spells, he said they work however not for that long without taking a life… you see, the only alternative is to become immortal. He’s got word voldemort has one horcrux in gruelgoats storage depository and another safely hidden by the wizarding life insurance corporation, on a good note TWLIC is now offering the old fashioned method of cryostasis and we should be able to purchase with in the next few months once gringots opens, let’s get this ball rolling! I won’t be happy until all you devs are locked away in cryostatis.

I personally I have always preferred the idea of a static reward to other alternatives but that is a very fringe position. I am very surprised to find it here in a project I am already so interested in. So much about this project continually reaffirms how smart I think you guys are.

However I would suggest that it may be worth considering the optics. People gripe about the pitiful tail emission in Monero. It’s ridiculous. If you do this there will be fork after fork after fork proposing to “fix” the inflation “problem” of grin. To be the “Austrian economics compliant version of grin”. And there will be troglodytes out there who refuse to use grin for this reason. If their marketing and sophistry is good enough they may even manage to leverage it into a more capitalized block-chain than grin that routinely pillages your hard work instead of doing any of its own development.

Just something to think about.


Gringots is gringots, it’s got the marketing down. Personally I’m happy with what has been proposed, it’s clearly been well thought about and yes Monero curve and block rewards specifically look awful. Grin is better than that. I feel what is important is the technological advancement. Being open source, the best one will always win.



Alternatively you could respond to the arguments

Should I argue about the true cause of the civil war while I’m at it? I didn’t mention that either. The point of my post was to bring attention to the idea that some people would respond very negatively to a static emission rate. It is my belief that this negative attitude would be unfounded, but if it weren’t unfounded, if they weren’t troglodytes but in fact the enlightened ones, that would only serve to make my point stronger.

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I for one don’t believe in Gresham’s law… it’s subjective, the understand of the scene of bad money drives out good money.
I think of it as a hot potato. If you get money that is a hot potato, you will pass it on if you have the opportunity, because it burns your hands.
From this perspective, bad money getting passed on around faster and faster could indicate a process of “un-moneyness”, a money that’s turning into a non-money.

Yes, at any given instant the quantity will be finite.
I plotted a fixed emission rate f, the integration of that emission g (total units in circulation), and also the proportion of f over g, which is the inflation rate.

The plot is in log scale for both axis.
(the actual zero on y axis is, vertically, in minus infinite)

Grin Inflation Plot Image

For pratical purposes, the green line will eventually move horizontally, when the inflation rate basically reaches zero. So the difference to bitcoin is the “focus” of the inflation. Bitcoin brings it closer to the start, and Grin spreads it to a very long period.

And this one would be bitcoin’s, with the same style of plotting:

Bitcoin Inflation Plot image

Thought I should drop this here as well:

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I have no idea where i got this but might be relevant somehow :slight_smile:

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Has consideration been given to more mature projects like Monero having tried 60 second blocks and reducing them to 120 seconds for security?


Yes, consideration was given :slight_smile: But considerations can differ with time and circumstance. More specifically:

  • Over 2 years have passed since that change, we have likely another 2 years before having larger blocks could become an issue. Several studies have shown that worldwide bandwidth capacity has increased significantly in the past few years.
  • We’re starting with compact blocks and compact rage proofs right away, so our blocks should be significantly smaller (and faster to propagate) than full Monero blocks with ring-CT.


I don’t think aiming low and thinking its only going to reach xmr level of use is the right call. If future proofing is on the table, doing it before it becomes an ugly debate would probably be wise.

Neither points are at odds with future proofing.