Originally Posted by MikeRoth

There will only ever be 21,000,000 bitcoins. Once the 21 million are mined that is it. It's not like the U.S. Government which just creates more "money" willy nilly to pretend the economy is doing better.

The total computational power is only related to the difficulty which is used to control the amount of bitcoins mined. This prevents all 21 million bitcoins from being mined in a short period of time.

Also the amount of bitcoins per block halves every 4 years. "Blocks are mined every 10 minutes, on average and for the first four years (210,000 blocks) each block included 50 new bitcoins. As the amount of processing power directed at mining changes, the difficulty of creating new bitcoins changes. This difficulty factor is calculated every 2016 blocks and is based upon the time taken to generate the previous 2016 blocks"