[rthomas6]

If large deflation was planned in the beginning, it would very much benefit the early adopters. Also you're misunderstanding me a bit: I didn't mean the difficulty would only be tied to demand, but to have it factored in in addition to the current hash rate. Of course difficulty would still increase in proportion to the hash rate. I mentioned elsewhere that it might make more sense to vary the mining reward based on the demand, instead of the difficulty, such that blocks are still verified at a predictable rate, but the reward for each block can change.