Bitcoin inflation has this nasty property that some part of it hammers the exchanges. This part is currently growing, but not as fast as it should, because of the preordering delays and scams in the mining hardware part. But, once difficulty reaches some kind of equilibrium, you get the situation where you need fresh money just for the price to stay the same.
When the difficulty is constantly increasing (a situation we've been in for a while), the amount of coins being mined is greater than it would be if the difficulty stabilizes (no new hashing power added to the network).
Holliday...you understand what the difficulty recalculation actually does, don't you?
I think he does. If you doubt that, are you sure you understand it? When the difficulty increases, then blocks are mined with increasing speed until the next adjustment, which happens earlier than two weeks (because of the difficulty increase). Thus there are indeed more coins mined per unit time in this case as to the 'planned' 2016 blocks per two weeks (since the 2016 block period takes less than two weeks to be finished).
Fair enough. And yes, I do understand the 'ahead of target' discussion with regards to more coins being minted per time period.
The interesting thing there though also is, there's no certainty as to whether those "extra" coins are actually going straight to market or not. If they're not, it seems to make the current price lull/decrease that much more puzzling for all the "Bitcoinz to $10,000 in the very near future" screamers.
