In terms of total supply, you are absolutely right.
But in terms of circulating supply, it is my understanding that backers will be unlocking 10m mina per month for many more months: https://minaprotocol.com/blog/mina-token-distribution-and-supply
That combined with locked tokens vesting for core team, MF, and 0(1) absolutely dwarfs the additional 1440 mina per block that supercharged rewards offers.
I agree that if the only metric is staking percentage, then lowering SC makes sense, and you might as well make it 0. It’s stupid easy to stake, there’s essentially no barrier to entry. But to combat inflation, I think we must think about 2 types of inflation. There’s circulating supply inflation, and there’s total supply inflation. As long as circulating supply inflation dominates total supply inflation, total supply inflation doesn’t bother me.
Struggling to attach an image here, but some “rough numbers” might look like someone buying 1000 mina at a circulating supply of 100m mina. They get 24%, 24%, 23%, 10% apy, and after 4 years the circulating supply is 1b mina. They have 2100 mina. They started with a thousandth of 1% share of circulating supply, they ended with 21 ten-thousandths. If instead they get 24%, 12%, 11%, 10%, then they end up with 1700 mina, or 17 ten-thousandths of circulating supply. Crude numbers, but the broad strokes are there.
I guess my point is either way, there’s insane downward pressure on price for people who just buy and stake the token. SCR give that group a little something for their trouble, and their trouble is making the market for insiders to sell into, so they are certainly providing a service. Since insiders earn BR, but not SCR, it’s easy to vote to stop offering SCR. But while millions of mina per month are being released into circulating supply, I think it’s a little penny wise to be thinking about the inflation impact of thousands of mina per month. I wonder who will be buying this millions per month, knowing that there is millions more coming next month, and as a token staker only, every other demographic in the mina ecosystem is on the dole, except yourself.
I’ve long-been an advocate for the good sense this tokenomics espouses: productive members of the ecosystem get grants, salary, etc… and token holders get diluted but to an acceptable amount after staking rewards and the economic value the other members provide. I think the original economics whitepaper SCR makes sense. I’m just providing the devil’s advocate here, and the case against thoughtlessly lowering SCR. SCR are an incentive module to buy up investor tokens as they vest and sell. It’s another form of community reward for a different kind of community member. Inflation hawks could come here and propose burning community grant funds to raise token price, but I doubt that would be so unanimous as reducing rewards for the “public investor” class, since people on this forum are recipients or hopefuls to receive that money.
Edit: I wrote “thousands of mina per month”, which is not accurate. SCR are also millions per month. But that error does not affect the napkin math of stakers getting diluted by locked shares vesting. As the circulating supply goes double or triple per year (for the first 2 years mostly), people growing their stack by 24% are getting diluted in terms of circulating supply. That is clear. Though in terms of inflation, it is obviously relevant that SCR are on the order of thousands per hour, not thousands per month.