I was curious about the real inflation rate (=growth of the money supply) of major altcoins, in comparison to BTC. So I created this little "investigation" with the blockchain explorers.I took all major altcoins which were created more than 30 days ago, because in the case of very young coins the inflation rate would drop significantly in the next weeks (for this reason, BTB and FTC have the highest inflation in the table).For the next issue in July, I will add the most popular coins of the recent "altcoin wave". I will consider only coins which are on at least 2 exchanges and with stable trade volume. If you want, you can give reasons which altcoin to add. But it will not be a poll, because it would be too easy to manipulateHere is the list (in %), including an estimate for 365 day-inflation.(Updated 2013-06-26)Note: The "Last-30-day" data is the 30-day-projection of the last issue from June 6, which only considered 10 days, so it's not entirely comparable.Raw data and calculations:Sources: http://blockchain.info (BTC) http://explorer.litecoin.org (LTC) http://devtome.com (DVC) http://explorer.dot-bit.org (NMC)

Rank Coin 30 day 365 day Last 30-day Last Rank (projection) 1. BTE*# 0.316 3.8446 0.423 2 2. BTC 1.166 14.186 1.260 3 3. PPC+ 1.825 22.204 1.662 4 4. CNC*# 2.588 31.487 0.216 1 5. NVC+ 3.596 43.751 1.896 5 6. FRC 3.802 46.257 4.206 8 7. DVC 4.457 54.2268 4.716 9 8. LTC 4.930 59.9816 4.824 10 9. NMC 5.126 62.366 3.930 7 10. BQC 9.873 120.1215 9.921 11 11. TRC 10.927 132.945 12.642 12 12. BTB*+ 22.310 271.438 24.348 13 13. FTC* 25.850 314.508 2.922 6 * Young coins with less than 90 days of age. # Coins with a low block creation rate (BTE: last block 2013-05-31, CNC: about 5 blocks a day). Seems the difficulty is too high for the actual hashrate. In the case of BTE I took the 10 last days of May because there were no blocks in June (dead?) + = Coins with Proof-of-Stake (PoS blocks have a very low reward compared to PoW blocks)

I can compare the 10 last days before 2013-05-19 when 0.4.2 was released (I hope date is right?)Inflation in NVC 0.4.1 seems to have been significantly higher:1,118 % inflation / 10d before 2013-05-19 and 0,632 % / 10d after the update.

I can compare the 10 last days before 2013-05-19 when 0.4.2 was released (I hope date is right?)Inflation in NVC 0.4.1 seems to have been significantly higher:1,118 % inflation / 10d before 2013-05-19 and 0,632 % / 10d after the update.

Updated the list to 2013-06-26. Now we have the first real 30-day inflation data. 365-day value is still a simple projection. Some things I noted: - BTE is still in a problematic situation as the difficulty seems still way to high for the actual hashrate. So it has still the "lowest inflation", but only because of the problems with the blockchain. - CNC has improved a bit, but still has few blocks per day. - FTC has resolved the hi-diff-slowdown and is now the coin with the highest inflation. That is normal because it's the second-youngest coin in the list. Bitbar is a bit less inflationary because of the proof-of-stake design. - NVC has a significantly higher inflation rate now. That could be related to the higher PoS interest rate implemented in NVC 0.4.2. Interesting to observe how this continues. The other coins have about the same inflation as in the last issue: - A low-inflation group with BTC, PPC and (for now) BTE and CNC - a mid-inflation group with LTC, NMC, FRC and DVC (now NVC could be added to this group) - a high-inflation group with BQC and the younger coins.

It's really interesting to see all the altcoins have higher inflation rates than BTC. It occurs to me that 14% inflation rate is already way too high . . . do we really need $360,000 worth of new coins for miners every day? An altcoin with a low inflation rate would be interesting.