I disgree however a (little) bit about the development incentives. The opposing fraction has always the threat to hard fork away. So if the development goes so wrong that the majority of hodlers oppose a certain change, they can take away the dev tax.
This does not really work in practice, it is only a theoretic argument because in shitcoins everything is extremely centralized around the original team that creating a viable opposition is not practical. We have seen many cases whether of chains or tokens where the founders did all kinds of things that are bad and many in the community disagree with it but ultimately they had to accept it, there were very few examples of opposition like ETC. So yeah while it is true that it could be done, it is not realistic in those conditions. This is why many of these things stay so centralized and the founders keep extracting value since opposition is not possible, usually there are very few people or none who could even continue protocol development. This is different in Bitcoin that must be mentioned.
500,000 per year? I would not believe that at all, I find it even 100,000 per year to be high if you ignore the early days and satoshi.
You may be correct. I checked the sources and the ones that gave high five-fold or sixfold numbers either take into account much earlier years (not always Satoshi-era, but mid-2010s) or seem outright speculative.
For example
BitGo estimates that "if only 0,5% lose their coins, then we have >90,000", but 0.5% of hodlers aren't the same as 0.5% of the supply. Big holders tend to have excellent security practices and thus are much less likely to lose the coins. And a lot of the coins are in ETFs, treasuries and other big wallets very unlikely to get lost.
River Financial estimates a total of 1.4 million plus Satoshi's coins, that would roughly amount to 100k per year but also very likely most of them were lost in early years.
A source that claims 500,000 or more are lost is
this one at Binance Square citing Cane Island (3-4% per year). There's a terrible lack of details and thus I consider it untrustworthy. Perhaps this was used as the source for that Zcash X comment ...
In contrast there is
this report that claims that "experts" in 2025 estimated the number to be only 1,500 to 2,000 per year. I think this could still be true, and it would prove my point of course that 4% is way too high for a tail emission.
Yeah exactly the number of holders has nothing to do with the number of coins, and there are going to be many outliers. I have never lost any coins and neither did any people that I have known, so any extrapolation from big cases or known cases will be extremely suspicious and speculative with high inaccuracy. This is one of those cases where we should be publicly admitting that there simply is no way to provide a good estimate for this instead of speculating and making things up as some of those examples did. Any metric that you use is not going to be true, like using number of days since coin has never moved or public admissions of lost keys.
With these numbers I would strongly argue for a emission like Monero's under 1% per year. (But as written above, only as an emergency measure, or as a "guideline value" for new altcoins.)
Only if there is a proven issue that is happening and requires an emergency measure, but not in speculative stories of it will be an issue or like some people like to panic about everything and then overthink and imagine scenarios. If it does become an issue there is plenty of time to think and do something, the whole industry is not going to collapse in a day.
