It's not so bad in theory, at least it counters the deflationary-currencies-are-evil-and-stupid argument. The real worry is that now some entity has been entrusted with the ability to manipulate the value of the currency, and that the entity may violate that trust by later deciding to further inflate the currency.
Does anyone have a good explanation as to why this is supposed to be hard to achieve? What incentive do miners in the distant future have against inflating a cryptocurrency?
For example, take Bitcoin after the cap has been reached and mining bitcoins only gives fees. If 50% of miners cooperate to make blocks worth real bitcoins again, they will suddenly start raking in more profit. They will be devaluing everyone's stores of bitcoins to do it, but people who hold bitcoins have no say in it, only computing power does. If we assume that miners will be the main owners of bitcoins for all eternity then they will probably never agree to this, but if there are a lot of miners with very little in reserve then why wouldn't they accept devaluing bitcoins a little bit to get more per block mined?
Exchanges and other prominent users would probably also have to agree to the change. Things might get bad if there was a split between miners and everyone else because the miners could perform 51% attacks on the other fork, though.
The Jamaican bobsled team are going to the Olympics based on donations from a cryptocurrency based on a set of jokes centered around a picture of a dog from a blog.
There is a reason William Gibson stopped doing straight sci-fi.
Many people. I personally threw $100 in because why not? Its a small amount of cash to lose. I am willing to bet more then 300 people have spent more then $100.
The inflation rate over time will actually tend to zero, since each additional 5bn coins represents a smaller proportion of the total amount. A constant quantity over time translates into a decreasing rate of inflation.
This is important - anything that a majority of a cryptocurrencies userbase doesn't like won't get implemented because they wouldn't upgrade the protocol, they would fork it.
