Also, monopolization (or at least, stronger oligopolization) of supply is virtually guaranteed to lead to increase in per-coin price irrespective of whether there is an upper "production ceiling" or not
To be sure, but the the ceiling is supposed to counteract inflation, right? Once the maximum amount has been "minted", then deflation happens and prices of goods / services drop, right? And that's why BTC is divisible to eight places right? I'm just trying to make sure I understand the fundamentals.
Basically, something like that.
What you have to "grok" though, is that bicoins (and other coins) are not gold chunks that can magically travel by hitching a ride on electrons in the wires, they are
unprecedented things that are best described as
abstract, individually unique counterfeit-proof constructs created by means of complex mathematical computations and maintained in a rather unusual distributed database.
They are not gold and don't even really approximate "practical" behavior of gold (for starters, the excavation of gold is virtually guaranteed to not only remain stable, but to actually accelerate for the foreseeable future, while bitcoins will exhibit a sharp and unavoidable drop in production in our lifetimes...), and are distinct from (nearly?) any commodity due to being essentially infinitely divisible (the "8 decimal places" limit is arbitrary and can be programatically upgraded to "whatever number of places you feel like" with relatively little grief) and infinitely re-nominable (with same ease, you could move the dot the other way and trade Kilobitcoins and Megabitcoins, which by the way sound quite sweet)
And finally, coin-conomy is not a proper "state-like" economy as usually assumed in various x-flation arguments, and frankly I doubt that it could be, even in theory.
So all the usual arguments about coin-flation assume things about them 'coinsiz that are plainly wrong.
But I don't really mind deflation (technically, even my coins have it, and might get some more if I can seduce someone to code in a certain non-miner-offending pseudo-deflationary influence for a bounty in GG). What I find mind is the stale mindset that demands that every alt-coin have it implement the bitcoin way "BCoz it iz ze right way!1!" (with all due respect, it is currently not practically known what are the mid, let along long term, effects of cutting miner subsidy in a system dependent on said miners for its very operation and prone to "spirals of doom" in case of their mass exodus)
