Monero looks good for privacy, but still has diminishing rewards for mining over time. The rate of new coin emission decays exponentially.
Unlike Bitcoin, which flattens out entirely with a limit of 21k BTC, Monero settles into a fixed linear growth. This is an advantage, but only a slight one. Monero promises that linear growth will mean zero inflation, but nothing about whether the money emission will be adequate to sustain it's value as currency. More importantly, it does nothing to address the exponential decay of the reward rate, where early miners reap huge rewards while latecomers get very little. It will be something like 50 years before the tail emission catches up to the first 5 years. Monero will have to continue increasing in value (iow be deflationary) in order for mining to be worth it as coin rewards diminish. This deflationary property works heavily against any digital coin's utility as a viable currency. If it's not deflationary, block mining will have to be funded by something else, like transaction fees, at which point people might start deciding that trading money with fiat is cheaper than Monero unless you are money laundering.
Here's a graphical analysis of Monero vs Bitcoin money supply and block reward:
https://imgur.com/a/De0G2
Note that the point of those images is to show that Monero block rewards are predicted to always beat Bitcoin rewards, except in a few edge cases due to the BTC cliffs. But what that really shows me is that Monero's reward schedule far more aggressively favored early miners. Over half of the existing supply appears to have been mined within the first year.
Unlike Bitcoin, which flattens out entirely with a limit of 21k BTC, Monero settles into a fixed linear growth. This is an advantage, but only a slight one. Monero promises that linear growth will mean zero inflation, but nothing about whether the money emission will be adequate to sustain it's value as currency. More importantly, it does nothing to address the exponential decay of the reward rate, where early miners reap huge rewards while latecomers get very little. It will be something like 50 years before the tail emission catches up to the first 5 years. Monero will have to continue increasing in value (iow be deflationary) in order for mining to be worth it as coin rewards diminish. This deflationary property works heavily against any digital coin's utility as a viable currency. If it's not deflationary, block mining will have to be funded by something else, like transaction fees, at which point people might start deciding that trading money with fiat is cheaper than Monero unless you are money laundering.
Here's a graphical analysis of Monero vs Bitcoin money supply and block reward:
https://imgur.com/a/De0G2
Note that the point of those images is to show that Monero block rewards are predicted to always beat Bitcoin rewards, except in a few edge cases due to the BTC cliffs. But what that really shows me is that Monero's reward schedule far more aggressively favored early miners. Over half of the existing supply appears to have been mined within the first year.