How did we arrive at the number 45 billion? Why not any other number, was this number randomly selected or is there some kind of math behind selecting this as the supply?
On stack exchange, someone claims that Hoskinson has once joked:
“It’s because 44 999 999 999 was not enough, and 45 000 000 001 was too much.”
It does not really matter, though. Or at least it’s for the most part psychological. Currencies have historically worked with different total supplies and different values of their base unit. It’s just important that they do not fluctuate too much (which is violated by all cryptocurrencies at the moment even more than by the fiats – at least the fiats of the privileged countries, even in a rather large crisis). As long as they are stable, it doesn’t matter much if a price is 1 EUR, 2 ADA, 1000 Lira, or a tiny fraction of a Bitcoin.
What has a bit of practical significance is the maximum of 45 quadrillion Lovelace, because they cannot be divided further. We’ll see if that ever leads to problems, not being able to express very small values, because the value – measured in other currencies or in goods – has risen too much.
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Thank you, this was insightful.
I have been pondering this myself, as we are planning to run an ICO on the Cardano network.
And I did not know how high or low to set the total cap. I ended up just setting the binary number for one thousand 
As users do one input and get several outputs.
So max supply of our Tinker Token = 1.111.101.000