The Mint Function, Blockchain Inflation, and Currency Debasement

The original Bitcoin whitepaper described a ledger-based currency that used cryptography to make it impossible to artificially inflate the monetary supply, and a distributed public ledger that would provide permanent traceability of money ownership transfers back to its origin. In the system described by Nakamoto the monetary supply would inflate, but only along a predetermined curve, rewarding early miners with new coins at a greater rate than later miners to get coins into circulation early on, and rewarding later miners with more valuable transaction fees as the minting of new coins on the chain slows.