You are right. That would make... Number go up!

But really, I don't think anyone knows what a deflationary currency would be like. It's not like fiat currency will go away.

There will probably be some people who want to fork Bitcoin to increase the supply.

It never stops, it just starts awarding them slower and slower as mining difficulty increases. So, the total approaches an asymptote.

> slower and slower as mining difficulty increases

That makes no sense. The entire point of difficulty adjustments is to keep a constant average blocktime.

It stops. We can predict when it will stop.

Upon reading more I see you're right. I might have been getting blockchains mixed up.