Thanks @blocks8 for starting this discussion! Awesome to see 7th Ave Group do such extensive work on the topic. I wanted to chime in with some comments.
I think the Stacks community broadly aligns on the view that “Stacks is different from Bitcoin” meaning Bitcoin is meant to be digital gold, and sound money; Stacks is not trying to compete with Bitcoin there. Stacks is trying to make BTC productive and make BTC more useful as an L2 and STX serves a different purpose from BTC. It’s extremely important for Bitcoin to have a clear, fixed 21M supply that can never be changed but STX is different where the community, by following the SIP process and proper voting, can collectively agree on any tweaks that are needed to ensure success of Stacks as a Bitcoin L2.
Fun fact: in the original Stacks offering in late 2017, the proposed supply was 6 billion STX by year 20 after launch. See page 16 here. The original offering from Oct 2017 is archived here. Then there was a community-led discussion in 2019 (before the SEC qualified offering) where 2050 supply was reduced to approx 2B (archive here). And then further reduced to 1818M (even less than 2B) afterwards and before Stacks mainnet launch in early 2021. So there is a long history of the Stacks community coming together to discussing this topic, engaging relevant experts to provide in-depth analysis of the issues at hand, and then reaching some common ground that can be voted upon.
It’s also interesting to see the decentralized ecosystem in action when some times proposed changes to token emissions are effectively rejected by the community! For example, this SIP proposal in 2022 never made it to voting stage and community feedback sort of killed the proposal. Decentralization at work!
Now, with Nakamoto launch around the corner early next year. This seems like a great time to look at token emissions and coinbase rewards with a fresh eye and double-check if they make sense in the new reality out there. sBTC signers need to be properly incentivized and mining decentralization is an imp topic.
I might chime in with more thoughts later but wanted to leave some historic context here and leave my initial thoughts that I welcome this discussion! The 7th Ave Group report is making some valid points.