In 2017, 75% of existing Monero will already be mined and yet, for me and many others in my position, Monero seems just be at the very beginning of its existence. Is it possible to change the total supply afterwards, by a Hard Fork for example?
Does is prevent the equal distribution of Moneros? By the fact that at the very beginning only a small number of people mine and are aware of the existance of monero. So they would own 75% of the total...
Is it possible to change the total supply afterwards, by a Hard Fork for example?
That would be possible, but it would break the social contract. I am quite certain almost all community members and miners would be opposed to it.
Does is prevent the equal distribution of Moneros?
Not necessarily. Given that Monero has a tail emission of <1% per year (the actual number is approximately 0.85%), the portion of the "early adopters" will somewhat dilute. In addition, Monero has always had high volume trading and furthermore had a fair launch. Therefore, one could argue that the distribution is relatively fair.
Monero launch was announced in bitcointalk before it happened, the emission curve was already decided and was never changed, to do so would unjustly favor early adopters and miners, also it had no premine. There is the "crippled miner" factor, that allowed an US professor to mine moneroj at a more efficient rate than the public miner allowed as result of the forked code from Bytecoin that would be promptly patched by Monero developers as soon as it was found. The scenario where more efficient mining software/hardware is held in private is quite known and has a precedent in the Bitcoin/Litecoin world.
A fair number of people were in contact with Monero directly or indirectly in the early days as it dominated the exchanges volume for a considerable amount of time, in fact the volume and momentum were so impressive it lead Poloniex to open several XMR pairs for trading, moreover the bear market that followed allowed anyone to acquire large quantities of XMR at a very low (<1USD) price for several months.
This is kind of a chicken and egg problem.
For someone to come years later and wonder about this, the coin must be alive still. This means there must not have been any moment in its history where the vast majority of people thought there was no point mining this coin. This is the reason why there is more incentive given to early miners to support the coin, since it has not proven itself yet, and so it is seen as very risky to mine this coin and hold it.
Moreover, the percentage of coins already issued at a given moment is only a factor if you're going to be mining (note: I'm not talking about the relative holdings of different people, just the percentage of issued coins, these are very different things to consider). If you're not going to mine, but are considering buying instead, then the price/market cap is much more salient.
Additionally, whether people have profited or lost in the past should have no bearing on whether a coin is good to buy and/or mine, all other things being equal.
Note: the things I said above are what I said, and nothing more. For example, "whether people have profited or lost in the past should have no bearing..." does NOT mean that the particular circumstances in which this may have happened should not have bearing. Just make sure I an not misundedrood :)
It is already designed to be an unlimited supply. After the mining reward drops below .3 then Monero starts generating .3 monero a minute to help pay the miners off. Around 18 million Monero issued this happens, resulting in ".85%" increase in supply that slowly drops (the percentage) as Monero mining runs out of newly mined coins and this .3 Monero becomes a smaller and smaller percentage.... It seems the best of both worlds with a limited supply that slowly increases with time.
