It doesn't matter at all how the coins are emitted so long as it is predictable and at reasonable pace.
I'm afraid it does matter because the protocol controls scarcity (defined by the amount of financial effort required to extract the next coin from the chain) and the secondary market (exchanged based trading) puts a value on that.
Let me remind you that we are now where I predicted we'd be, not where Ryan Taylor predicted we'd be based on the protocol adjustments he recommended to the masternode community 2 years ago.
• "circulating supply" (a dodgy definition at best since MN collateral circulates but lets give him the benefit of the doubt) has gone up, not down. We've lost nearly 1000 nodes since ATH
• price has gone down not up $100 then $55 now. (So MNs capital loss on their collateral has blown their rewards to Kingdom Come over that period)
• chain usage (monetary velocity) has been static (around 20k transactions per day if we're lucky)
• marketcap has gone down, not up (nearly $1 Billion in Oct 2020, $0.6 billion now. Meanwhile Litecoin only lost around 10% mk)
• ranking, and of particular interest, ranking against fully-mined POW coins has tanked (23 then, 75 now)
Re. that last point. Since the protocol change we haven't gained on one single fully mined POW coin in the last 2 years. Let that sink in in the context of the "we don't need all this hashrate" mantra. It appears we did need it.
A somewhat dismal performance against expectations - and exactly as I predicted. "Mining" is simply metaphor. What it really is is a trustless market and if you feed too much supply into that market at zero price you will corrode everything from store of value performance to usage.
A masternode is simply a zero-difficulty miner in economic terms since its reward comes directly from the blockchain. Masternodes dump their supply on secondary markets just as miners do except they never had to "buy" it as miners do. It's massive selling without any balancing acquisition cost.
That's core the reason for the chronic under-performance compared to fully mined equivalents (FME's).
******* Addendum *******
Before people start with the "but everyone's switching to Proof of stake" mantra:
Proof of stake is a service based economy. The investment aspect of it works by having a stake in a growing service offering platform. So it's like a trustless version of classic business shares. It's also like that in the sense that when some other "service" comes along thats more efficient, your shares can be obsolesced if you don't sell them and jump to the "next big thing".
So there are basically 3 types of investible electronic asset classes:
• commodity money (limited supply tokens that are as expensive to mine as they are to buy)
• stable coins (unlimited supply tokens that have and external peg such as the $USD)
• service platforms
Etherum et al is a service platform. Dash is commodity money. Do not ever conflate the two or we will fall into the biggest crevace ever prepared for crypto scams. Ethereum and its clones can get away with converting to POS, we cannot we were never in the "services" business in the first place.
Dash's "service layer" is there to enhance its role as commodity money and allow it to function as a currency along the lines of making coinage out of metal nuggets. There is no "service" offered other than making bitcoin more fungible, exchangeable and useable for the payment of goods. We have lost sight of that identity and that has caused a crisis of competitively.
