FAQ entry on our "official" current position on tail emissions

[alexlyp]

Since this is a common question we probably should have an entry about it somewhere.

Here is davec's response from a recent reddit thread that could be used as a starting point:

That said, I don't even see any real benefit to debating this at this point as nobody truly knows whether or not any cryptocurrency really needs a tail emission. Anyone claiming otherwise is feeding you a bill of goods because none of us can see the future. My personal feeling on the matter is that I am extremely against tail emissions for several reasons, but two of the biggest are because it means the currency is no longer deflationary and that tail emissions are simply a disguised form of a stealth tax that a centralized planning committee has the power to adjust. We already have this in the current financial system in the form of arbitrarily minting new bills, and we've seen how that turns out. Moreover, with the exception of provably burned coins, which is a very rare case, there is no legitimate way to know if coins are truly lost or not. Claims of lost keys are not sufficient since you can't really prove they aren't lying or be sure that they won't find the keys in the future. Furthermore, coins with truly lost keys might ultimately become spendable again because they, by definition, can't be moved to newer cryptographic schemes, and eventually, on a long enough time scale, it is incredibly likely the current cryptography will be broken which will make those coins spendable again, thus inflating the supply if you had already minted new ones to take their place prior. Finally, I suspect that if network security is truly dependent on a constant stream of new coins being generated, that amount would very likely have to be high enough that it would have a significant and constant dilution effect on the existing holders to the point it would realistically break the social contract agreed to by most people who choose to use the system.

[jholdstock]

Re-opening this because I think there is still some nuance captured in Dave's writing which was not included in #976