StarkWare CEO proposes a 4% annual inflation rate for Bitcoin to replace the 21 million cap

According to Cointelegraph, StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson posted on the X platform, proposing to replace Bitcoin's hard cap of 21 million coins with a 4% annual issuance rate. He believes the current hard cap is "unreasonable" because private keys will be lost over time, stating, "As time approaches infinity, all private keys will be lost." Ledger estimates that approximately 4 million Bitcoins have already been permanently lost. Ben-Sasson indicated that a 4% annual issuance rate roughly matches the global population growth rate.

The proposal has sparked strong opposition from the community. Opponents argue that the fixed cap is at the core of Bitcoin's value, and that Bitcoin can be divided into 21 trillion satoshis, which is sufficient to address the issue of decreasing available supply. Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox suggested that Bitcoin developers refer to the "network sustainability mechanism" that Zcash is considering—maintaining the fixed cap but allowing users to destroy tokens, gradually reissuing them as block rewards over four years to alleviate the pressure on miner incentives without breaking the hard cap. Any such changes would require consensus among Bitcoin developers, miners, and node operators, which is extremely challenging under a decentralized governance model.