One week after publishing his whitepaper Satoshi says this.

If there was some clever way, or if we wanted to trust someone to actively manage the money supply to peg it to something, the rules could have been programmed for that.

Link to the satoshi original post publishing bitcoin whitepaper on the p2pfoundation on ning

Link to the Sepp Hasslberger original post on the p2pfoundation on ning

Sepps Question

I have two questions, Satoshi.

the first one ties in with Joerg's doubts about the trusted supply of tokens/coins.

As far as I understand, there will be a limit of the total amount of tokens that can be created, and a changing gradient of difficulty in making the tokens, where the elaboration gets more and more difficult with time. Is that correct?

It is important that there be a limit in the amount of tokens/coins. But it is also important that this limit be adjustable to take account of how many people adopt the system. If the number of users changes with time, it will also be necessary to change the total amount of coins.

Is there a formula to decide on what should be the total amount of tokens, and if so, what is the formula?

If there is no formula, who gets to make that decision and based on what criteria will it be made?

I will keep my second question for later. One thing at a time...

Link to the original answering post by Satoshi to Sepp Hasslbergers question

Satoshis Answer

It is a global distributed database, with additions to the database by consent of the majority, based on a set of rules they follow:

• Whenever someone finds proof-of-work to generate a block, they get some new coins
• The proof-of-work difficulty is adjusted every two weeks to target an average of 6 blocks per hour (for the whole network)
• The coins given per block is cut in half every 4 years

You could say coins are issued by the majority. They are issued in a limited, predetermined amount.

As an example, if there are 1000 nodes, and 6 get coins each hour, it would likely take a week before you get anything.

To Sepp's question, indeed there is nobody to act as central bank or federal reserve to adjust the money supply as the population of users grows. That would have required a trusted party to determine the value, because I don't know a way for software to know the real world value of things. If there was some clever way, or if we wanted to trust someone to actively manage the money supply to peg it to something, the rules could have been programmed for that.

In this sense, it's more typical of a precious metal. Instead of the supply changing to keep the value the same, the supply is predetermined and the value changes. As the number of users grows, the value per coin increases. It has the potential for a positive feedback loop; as users increase, the value goes up, which could attract more users to take advantage of the increasing value.

In case of AMPL Instead of the value changing to keep the supply the same, the value is predetermined and the supply changes

For example if someone buys and hold AMPL for an investment of 1,000 USD in AMPL made when AMPL market cap is at 100 million will be valued at 100,00 USD if the market cap touch 1 billion. ( Because the 1000 AMPL bought at 1 USD would have rebased to 10000 AMPL by the time the market cap is at 1 billion )

Is AMPL at 50 million USD market cap is AMPL an opportunity like in the early days of bitcoin? In order to commit a long term farming contract etc paid in half now and half after 6 months on harvest the payment in bitcoin or satoshi may not be widely accepted because of the volatile nature Does AMPL Spot - a derivative of AMPL which is pegged to USD value of 2019 - and inflation resistant stable coin become the currency of choice for such trade contracts? Will AMPL volume become comparable to that of USDT in future? Only time can answer these questions.