More bitcoins can be “mined” – it’s intended to be a moderately painful/slow computation, which effectively sets their real value to some product of compute power devoted times cycles needed, which should set their base value at something that decreases year over year if one assumes the market is rational; higher bitcoin value or lower cost to compute one should result in more production until the value balances.
I haven’t looked carefully enough to know whether the algorithm gets progressively more difficult, or would be expected to have “bad ore” periods, either of which could cause the flow of new bitcoins to slow. Or if everyone’s just lost interest in mining. Or if the market is being manipulated (which is what I’d personally suspect; this sounds like a market more than ripe for pump-and-dump).
