I 100% agree that making Threshold more appealing to long-term investors should be a major priority. There is certainly a strong case to reduce the number of liquid tokens distributed to non-active tBTC nodes.
That graph/data is presented as a starting point for the DAO – on which to build thorough analyses, draw diverse interpretations, and make a better-informed collective decision.
This analysis defies the law of supply and demand. You’re suggesting that there is correlation where there is none.
As you also stated, there are a myriad factors affecting price. But here you’re alluding that the price would either not increase or in fact drop faster with less supply on the market.
I didn’t claim that a supply reduction would lead to a price decrease. Besides a few notable observations which I enumerated, the over-arching (and rather obvious) insight from this data is that there is no strong bivariate correlation or trend line. Hence my assertions; ‘reducing inflation is no guarantee of growth’ & ‘most mid-sized networks have depreciated, regardless of the change in reward rate’.
The absence of a correlation isn’t a win for the argument to kill rewards, because it equals an absence of historical precedence for this initiative succeeding – an initiative, which as you acknowledge, carries with it a litany of risks.
There is certainly an arguement to be made for why reducing inflation could be bad and cause price decrease, but it’s not related to the supply reduction (which is always unequivocally a positive) by itself.
It’s not unrelated, if and when the market prices in the consequences of a supply reduction (or more accurately, a reduction in the rate of supply growth). You cite a few of these possible consequences; less security, less users, less nodes.
Reducing rewards could only be ‘unequivocally a positive’ if it were possible to isolate monetary policy as the only independent variable, holding all other variables constant – i.e. the multitude of factors that impact aggregate demand for T.
T in many ways has been designed as a “down only” project where you have to stake to avoid dilution.
Do we consider Ethereum, Solana, TheGraph, Polygon, Filecoin and all the other staking/PoS networks to be ‘down only’ projects? One has to stake/delegate in all these networks to avoid being diluted. This notion that Threshold investors are uniquely maligned by inflationary economics, or that there isn’t a way for Threshold to grow in value whilst still subsidizing critical node activity, belies the trajectories of many other networks.