This one is very common from the Bitcoin cult, and is techically true.

However, there is a lot of thought and intentional design that has gone into the supply dynamics of Monero. Monero implements a “defined supply” of 18.4m coins, and has a tail emission of 0.6XMR per block after the defined supply has been mined. That tail emission starts ~May, 2022.

This means that Monero has extremely low inflation that approaches 0% forever, and is technically “disinflationary” or “asymptotatically approaching 0% inflation”. The inflation rate is currently lower than Bitcoin and gold, and will continue to decrease. It’s also important to realize that a low inflation rate like that of Monero is a way to replace lost coins over time in circulation, but is likely even too little inflation to account for lost coins (rough estimates are ~1.5% of coins lost in circulation each year, compared to Monero’s current inflation rate of 1.12% as of writing). This would mean that Monero is in fact deflationary, even with the low perpetual issuance.

It’s also extremely important to make it clear that Monero’s supply is pre-defined, verified and enforced via consensus, and entirely predictable, just like Bitcoin’s – you can know the inflation rate and totaly supply at any point in the future without doubts.

This tail emission enables two key features in Monero

A lower bound of network security forever (miners will always be able to rely on 0.6XMR per block, no matter the fee market)

A dynamic block size (Monero’s blocks can grow/shrink to adapt to short-term increases in usage, with a penalty to mining rewards during these times).

For more on both of these, see the resources below.

Resources

Descriptive website with graphs showing the supply dynamics of Monero: https://monero.supply

“Why Monero has a tail emission”: https://localmonero.co/knowledge/monero-tail-emission

“How Monero Solved the Block Size Problem That Plagues Bitcoin”: https://localmonero.co/knowledge/dynamic-block-size

Inherent risks in not having a defined block reward in perpetuity: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/mining_CCS.pdf

golds max supply is infinite so it must also be bad money too right?

Fiat issuance is centralized, unpredictable, and arbitrary

Monero issuance is the exact opposite of those three. Shares more similarities to gold.

A fixed supply also doesn't guarantee value. You can't control demand.

https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Scarcity-Fallacy

That was one of the questions that was open for me. The idea is, the "mining" never truly stops, but instead reduces to a stable value of 0.3 XMR per . This prevailing understanding is that this is a negligible factor because it is linear in nature, so it cannot by itself produce a x% kind of increase that compares to inflationary numbers. (It won't increase with increasing supply.)

I think this is actually an interesting observation, because if you think about it .. if XMR would run (very) low, the impact would be high, but with healthy numbers, it wouldn't contribute significantly. Unless I make a mistake in my reasoning, this means it is too weak to produce inflation, but does guarantee that you can never quite run out.

Got this from one of the vids people recommended in my question here.