Let me explain a bit more.
Security budget = (block-rewards + gas-fees) * STX-price
The average value of a stacking slot follows a similar equation with the same three variables.
I think that we’ll all agree that a high number for security budget and a high number for average value of a stacking slot are good things for the health/growth of the network.
Out of the three variables, we don’t know how (a) gas fees and (b) STX price is going to play out in the coming years but we can assume that both these numbers can grow in the coming years with more network growth (more developers building apps and users using apps).
The variable of block rewards was pre-determined before mainnet launch and is the only variable where we can predict how it is going to play out.
The reason why the emission curve is currently scheduled as 1000 STX dropping to 500 STX and so on is that there is an assumption there that in the coming years gas fees will compensate for the drop in block rewards. And also potentially STX price can also increase with network growth increasing the security budget.
The argument for this SIP is simply that higher block rewards are more needed in the early years than later on. If the gas fees were already becoming significant (say on average 500 STX or more per block) then we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
So the discussion that we should be having is how many years of bootstrapping time will the network require where the block rewards will be the main variable in the equation above? My guess is at least 2 years, but potentially more hence I’d be supportive of adjusting the emission curve to have higher block rewards in the next 2-6 years. I care less about block rewards later on because if after 6-7 years of operation the gas fees and/or STX price is still low then there is something fundamentally wrong and you have bigger problems. However, it’s important to give the network the time to reach escape velocity and optimize the emission curve for the coming years.
This is an interesting comment/idea. An increase in supply does effectively charge the inactive accounts (the folks who are not actively stacking). If you are an active stacker today (among the 35% of the supply) then you are effectively not getting diluted but in fact are earning proportionally more BTC than the net inflation per year (because the inactive accounts are taking the hit). So an increase in supply actually does cost the inactive accounts, and does not dilute down the active stackers (they’re earning more than the net dilution per year with current market dynamics and can always use a subset of BTC rewards to buy more STX say at the rate of inflation).
My comments above assumed no increase in supply but just adjustment of the emission curve. However, you can see from the reasoning above that even an increase in supply might be worth discussing (although harder to get enough support for). BTW, it’s amazing to see how decentralized this ecosystem is. I can tell from these discussions that the bar to making any change is very high and several different actors (community, miners, developers etc) will need to be aligned for any change and follow the SIP process. That’s a healthy thing for decentralization!