Thanks for linking the Grin article! Now you've sent me on a rabbit hole reading about different emission strategies and ideas. (I follow Beam development, so I love to read about both projects).
Doesn't the consistent emission of Grin depend upon the number of users and transactions also rising at the same consistent rate? Can we really count on that like we can count on the ticking of time?
Glad to hear that. In Grin, each block creates 60 coins. The time to mine a block is set to be 1 minute on average, so it will average out as 60 coins each minute and hence 1 coin per second. This won't be _exact_ of course due to the variance in block times so you definitely can't count on that - just like you can't count on Bitcoin getting exactly 24*6 blocks each day. But these systems are defined such that if the blocks start coming in too fast, they make them come slower and if they are coming in too slow, they make sure to make the puzzle easier to solve so the blocks can come faster. I think this follows the models they have good enough.
That does seem like a cool feature. It just requires a bit of a mindset change.
Compared with gold, yes you can estimate when new gold is unearthed, but at the same time, there is a theoretical limit to the total amount of gold in the ground, right?
I don't think Grin does this but you can adjust the emission schedule based on the clock time (Sia does) so that the number of total coins produced on a given date is within a very tight bound of its expected amount, regardless of how much the hashrate has changed.
Doesn't the consistent emission of Grin depend upon the number of users and transactions also rising at the same consistent rate? Can we really count on that like we can count on the ticking of time?