I read this whole thing and it fails to explain how a pederson commitment actually ensures no inflation happens. Sure maybe it does encrypt it but how do you know it’s not creating more monero? It’s encrypted so you can’t see it! Early on bitcoin actually had a bug that drastically inflated the supply but because the ledger was open and transparent, the dev team saw it and fixed it quickly. What if monero is leaking 0.1% monero with every other block mined? There is no way to verify that the supply is not increasing. You’re putting a lot of trust in code that may break without anyway of knowing when it’s broken.
Discussion
Show me a single proof that Monero is inflationary. There is no evidence that it's. It's even less inflationary than Bitcoin!
https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/13451/is-monero-an-inflationary-asset
You’re moving the goalposts. My initial question was how do you audit the supply of monero. You have failed to answer that question and it is very clear that you cannot. Monero users rely on some obscure cryptographic ring algorithm, whatever that means. But you can’t audit the supply so you trust this pederson commitment. And that’s fine if that’s what you want to hold.
How do Bitcoiners audit supply of Bitcoin? You probably just run a node to do this exactly like every Bitcoin and Monero user. No Bitcoiner is taking advantage of it's transparency/simple math to scrutinize the whole blockchain every block to make sure every single output equals all inputs. So in practice what is the difference?
Monero audits supply using bulletproofs and pedersen commitments. It is not obscure it is well established and sound cryptography from the 80s, but admittedly more complex than bitcoins simple math.
An exploited inflation bug would be equally catastrophic once it happened to either Bitcoin or Monero. Attackers have the advantage. There is no good solution to fix this without hurting other users on either Bitcoin or Monero.
Trivia: Did you know there was a hidden inflation bug in Bitcoin only an anonymous user knew? They couldve easily exploited it, but very luckily they were an honest actor who secretly let the devs know (who couldve also decided to exploit it). If they did exploit it, how would detectable inflation help after the fact? It wouldnt.