The Hive blockchain currently has an inflation rate of 8.5%, which decreases 0.5% each year

I find it odd that I (a not particularly techie guy) apparently understand this better than you do. Edit: didn’t mean for that to come out quite so snarky.

don’t quote me, as maybe it already dropped to 8%, I don’t know exactly when the change occurs

It’s come and gone. The formula for determining the current rate of inflation for the creation of Hive tokens is

(978 - (head_block_number / 250000)) / 100

Right now the current head_block_number is 46970092 so

(978 - (46970092 / 250000)) / 100 =

(978 - 187.880368) /100

= 7.90119632%

That’s the current inflation rate.

Well, not really, since it drops in 0.01% increments. So 7.91% now, 7.9% soon.

And it does not decrease by 0.5% per year. We all assume that the Hive inflation rate drops by 0.5% per year, but the rate of decline is actually a bit less than that. The FAQ underscores that:

Starting with the network's 16th hard fork in December 2016, Steem began creating new tokens at a yearly inflation rate of 9.5%. The inflation rate decreases at a rate of 0.01% every 250,000 blocks, or about 0.5% per year. The inflation will continue decreasing at this pace until the overall inflation rate reaches 0.95%. This will take about 20.5 years from the time hard fork 16 went into effect.

So by exactly 0.01% every 250,000 blocks, but only by about 0.5% per year.

The about 20.5 years from the FAQ suggests that the annual decease is actually closer to 0.417% but we’d have to crunch the numbers based on block creation to be more accurate.

1440 minutes in a day x 20 blocks created per minute equals 28,000 blocks per day.

Times 365 days equals 10,512,000 blocks per year.

Divided by 250,000 equals 42.048

So when converted to a percentage, the true value for the rate at which Hive inflation decreases is 0.42048% per year.

Except in leap years. 😅