Bitcoin (BTC -1.21%) holders, whether they realize it or not, are relying on one number to stay etched into stone just as it was originally carved. That number is 21 million, because it’s the maximum number of BTC that can ever exist, as defined by its protocol. One of the bigger names in crypto now wants to change that crucial dynamic.
On July 7, Eli Ben-Sasson, CEO of StarkWare and a co-founder of Zcash, proposed canning the 21 million BTC cap in exchange for adding a maximum annual issuance rate of 4%. At today’s supply of around 20.1 million BTC, this would mean minting 804,000 BTC in the first year alone, and more every year after that.
4% annual compounding would take Bitcoin’s supply past 53 million coins within 25 years.
Ben-Sasson argues that lost credentials are dragging the coin’s usable supply toward zero over a long enough horizon anyway, obviating the need for a strict limit. What would happen to Bitcoin if this proposal, or a similar one, were formalized and implemented?
Image source: Getty Images.
This would be catastrophic
First, a nod to Ben-Sasson’s perspective. His observation about coins exiting circulation due to lost credentials is grounded in reality. The hardware wallet maker Ledger estimates that up to 4 million BTC are burned or lost for good, and that sum is only going to increase over time.
But the main reason Ben-Sasson’s proposal is dead on arrival is that those lost coins are a permanent gift to everyone else who still controls their wallets and their coins, because they can’t be sold. They’re permanently committed to tightening the asset’s float by way of being inaccessible.
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Adding a provision to create a trickle of new coins would likely devalue all of the existing coins, whose value is highly dependent on the scarcity of supply in the long run.
There is a grain of a problem here
Ben-Sasson has another point that’s much harder to dismiss.
Bitcoin’s miners are paid by the block subsidy, which is currently 3.125 BTC per new block, and which is programmed to halve every four years on its way to zero. Miners also capture the fees users pay for block space, which are supposed to sustain them once the block subsidy reaches zero in about 2140.
But fees slid from about 7% of miner revenue in 2024 to roughly 1% in 2025. In the long run, the protocol may well need to be adjusted to incentivize them to keep mining new blocks, which Ben-Sasson’s proposal would fix.
Still, Ben-Sasson’s idea exists only as a post on social media, not as a formal Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP), the collaborative document that’s used for proposing protocol changes. Adopting it would require a hard fork of the chain. It would also need the blessing of miners and developers, none of whom are likely to ever be on board with such a proposal.
So, don’t worry too much about Bitcoin’s supply getting changed anytime soon.