[ghazak]

The primary benefit of a linear emission rate, as far as I’m concerned, is that it doesn’t depend on fees completely taking over from the block reward in order to provide adequate security against a 51% attack. It’s currently unknown whether a fee market will be stable over the long run in bitcoin, and this means there isn’t as much of an incentive to limit the block size for purely security purposes (there are other good reasons to limit the block size though), in addition to block sizes being harder to change once the network is running.

[koheripbal]

I think the argument being made is that linear emission is, in the long run, as insufficient as zero emission since it's an ever decreasing portion of the total money supply.

It really needs to be inflationary.