Update 6th November, 2025

[DavidMc0]

@whiteout2

I’m just sure they have thought through many of these points for many months / years

The team have done a great job on the tech, but my impression is that on the economics they have absolutely not thought through many of these points with due rigour.

Whenever community members have provided real economic arguments to challenge the logic for emissions, the team has never provided sound reasoning why it’s a good plan, and have uncritically asserted that it’s necessary, without clear reasoning as to why, e.g. in the whitepaper.

I trust the team on many levels, but believe they may well have a blind spot on economics / tokenomics / incentives. Fair enough as they’re mostly devs!

Either that, or they don’t communicate around the topic well / can’t due to the noise in the community whenever there’s attempts to discuss it openly.

At least they did slash the size of the emissions pool, reducing max supply from 4.3bn or so to 1.2bn, so even though the logic behind emissions seems poor, and they may be wasteful and a bit disruptive for a time, it’s a far smaller issue than it would have been if they hadn’t slashed the scale of emissions.

@Southside

I get the feeling that there is an illogical determination to stick to the present emissions scheme - just because it was in the WhitePaper.

I feel the same. It doesn’t seem to be a logical thing to issue tokens to pay nodes that aren’t needed to stay online, when sufficient nodes will join as soon as someone’s willing to pay them to store data.

@AlekseySolin

I simply cannot understand why the idea of rewarding nodes for being online, and emitting tokens to pay for the presence of nodes in the network, ever appeared in the first place

I have a feeling it originated from loosely copying Bitcoin’s incentivisation scheme and thinking that it’s necessary for nodes to be online. But of course, Autonomi nodes will be incentivised by the payments to store data. It’s a market for a resource, not a competition to win a prize (e.g. mining a Bitcoin block).

Anyway, we had lots of discussions around this after the new whitepaper was launched, and the team had some engagement & gave it as much attention as they felt it warranted, with the outcome of slashing emissions, but keeping them in the plan at the reduced rate and timeframe (12 years down from much longer, maybe 50 or so if I remember correctly). Not a bad outcome, even if no clear economic reasoning for emissions that addressed all the objections was provided.

Actually , Jim did provide some nice reasoning in a post a while back in response to some of my challenges:

@JimCollinson

Your arguments are not unreasonable… and certainly not if we are looking purely at supply and demand, and a nice and efficient market for storage.

But what if there are bumps in the road to getting there? Such as unforeseen lean spells, or external factors that aren’t the sole preserve of the that market, like speculation on the token?

We want a resilient and robust network, one that can weather some storms, and have nodes stick around through them.

Distributing the remaining supply steadily, and over an extended period, to those actively supporting and sticking with the Network come rain or shine, seems like a reasonable way of doing it.

And it does so in a decentralised way too.