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Eli Ben-Sasson, co-founder and CEO of StarkWare, has proposed scrapping Bitcoin’s sacred 21 million supply cap in favor of a maximum annual issuance rate of 4%. The idea, posted on X on July 7, is roughly as popular in Bitcoin circles as suggesting you rename the Mona Lisa.
Ben-Sasson’s argument hinges on a real and well-documented problem: Bitcoin private keys get lost. People die without passing along seed phrases. Hard drives end up in landfills. Wallets from 2011 sit untouched on forgotten laptops. The result is a steadily shrinking pool of usable Bitcoin, even as the protocol’s code marches toward its hard cap.
The case for perpetual issuance
Estimates suggest somewhere between 3 and 4 million Bitcoin are permanently inaccessible, representing roughly 15% to 20% of the total supply. That number only grows over time.
Ben-Sasson frames this as more than just a curiosity. It’s a structural threat. Bitcoin’s security model depends on miners being compensated for validating transactions. Right now, that compensation comes from two sources: block subsidies (newly minted Bitcoin) and transaction fees. The block subsidy halves roughly every four years, and eventually it drops to zero. At that point, transaction fees alone need to carry the entire weight of network security.
Ben-Sasson’s answer is to never let the subsidy fully disappear. A 4% annual issuance cap would ensure miners always have a meaningful incentive to secure the chain, while the continuous drip of new coins would offset the steady bleed of lost supply.
He has been careful to frame this not as inflationary recklessness but as a clearer monetary policy. A 4% ceiling, he argues, is still a rule-based system. It’s just a different rule than the one Satoshi Nakamoto wrote in 2009.
Why the Bitcoin community is not having it
Reactions to Ben-Sasson’s proposal were swift and overwhelmingly negative from Bitcoin maximalists. The community has historically treated any attempt to alter the supply schedule as an existential threat to the protocol’s credibility.
The counterargument to Ben-Sasson’s lost-coin concern is also straightforward: lost coins make remaining coins more valuable. If 4 million Bitcoin are gone forever, the effective supply is closer to 17 million.
There’s also the practical matter of governance. Bitcoin doesn’t have a CEO or a board of directors. Changing the issuance schedule would require overwhelming consensus among node operators, miners, and developers. The last time Bitcoin faced a contentious protocol change, the 2017 block size wars, it resulted in a chain split and the creation of Bitcoin Cash.
StarkWare’s Bitcoin ambitions add context
Ben-Sasson isn’t just a random commentator lobbing grenades. StarkWare is one of the most prominent cryptographic infrastructure companies in the industry, known for developing ZK-STARKs, a type of zero-knowledge proof technology. The company has been expanding its technology stack into the Bitcoin ecosystem, including privacy-focused initiatives like strkBTC.
StarkWare’s business increasingly depends on Bitcoin remaining a vibrant, secure, and actively used network. If mining economics deteriorate as block subsidies shrink, the security guarantees that underpin every layer built on top of Bitcoin, including StarkWare’s own products, become less reliable.
Ethereum took a different approach entirely with its shift to proof-of-stake and EIP-1559 fee burn mechanism, essentially redesigning its monetary policy from scratch. Bitcoin’s community has historically rejected that kind of flexibility as a core philosophical principle.
What this means for investors
As block subsidies continue halving, projected to drop below 1 BTC per block around 2036, the question of whether transaction fees alone can sustain network security will become less theoretical and more urgent.
The 3 to 4 million lost Bitcoin aren’t coming back, and the block subsidy really is heading toward zero. Investors positioned for the long term should monitor how Bitcoin’s fee revenue trends relative to its declining subsidy. That ratio, more than any proposal from a Layer 2 CEO, will ultimately determine whether the 21 million cap can survive contact with economic reality.
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