Eli Ben-Sasson, a co-founder of Zcash, has reopened one of Bitcoin's most sensitive debates by questioning the logic of the network's 21 million coin supply cap. In a post on X, he argued that a fixed total does not make sense if private keys keep getting lost over time, because the amount of usable BTC would keep shrinking even while the headline supply number stays unchanged.
He did not call for unlimited issuance. His position was narrower: Bitcoin should still have a clear and absolute monetary limit, but that limit could be defined through a capped issuance rate rather than a permanently fixed total stock.
Lost coins and post-2140 miner revenue sit at the center
Ben-Sasson's argument rests on two issues. One is the growing pile of inaccessible BTC. The article cites Ledger estimates placing lost Bitcoin between 2.3 million and 3.7 million coins, roughly 11% to 20% of all mined supply. That gap matters because nominal supply and economically usable supply are not the same thing.
The second issue is miner income. Once Bitcoin's halving cycle runs its course near 2140, block subsidy revenue would disappear and miners would rely mainly on transaction fees. For the smaller group that saw merit in the discussion, this is the real point: long-run security budgets, not a near-term price debate.
What the proposed alternative would look like
Instead of a hard cap on total coins, Ben-Sasson suggested a capped annual flow of new issuance. The example mentioned in the report was 4% per year, loosely tied to population growth. Other figures discussed around the idea included 1% and 2%.
Under that framework, newly issued BTC could offset coins lost to forgotten keys or abandoned wallets while also preserving a source of miner compensation after block rewards end. Any such change would require a hard fork, since it would rewrite Bitcoin's core consensus rules rather than adjust a secondary parameter.
Why Bitcoin's scarcity story is hard to tamper with
Bitcoin's identity has been built around scarcity. The 21 million limit is more than a line in code; it is part of the asset's claim to being digital gold and a major reason investors treated BTC as separate from centrally managed money systems.
A move to ongoing percentage-based issuance would alter that framing even if the inflation rate stayed low. The article argues that such a shift would push Bitcoin closer, at least in monetary design, to the way central banks manage currency supply. It also notes that BTC was trading near $63,870, up 1.81% on the day, with volume around $28.43 billion. The token had recently rebounded above $63,000 after dropping near $61,000 during US-Iran tensions.
Crypto history offers examples, but no direct blueprint
The report points to other assets that changed or adopted different supply models. Ethereum removed its hard cap and later added the burn mechanism introduced through EIP-1559, which has made ETH deflationary at times during periods of high network activity. Dogecoin, by contrast, operates with an uncapped supply and adds close to 5 billion new coins a year. Bitcoin Cash, which split from Bitcoin in 2017, kept the same 21 million limit but still lags far behind BTC in adoption and mining power.
Those examples do not settle the argument. They only show that hard-capped supply is not the sole factor behind market position. In Bitcoin's case, the issue is sharper because fixed supply is tied directly to its core narrative.
Community pushback was immediate, and the path is steep
According to the article, Bitcoin developers and holders, including Blockstream's Adam Back, rejected the idea outright. Many compared it to fiat-style monetary policy, while some also questioned Ben-Sasson's motives because of his ties to Starknet and Zcash.
A smaller set of voices treated the proposal as a legitimate way to discuss miner incentives after 2140. Still, changing Bitcoin's supply rule would require buy-in from node operators, miners, and the broader user base. History suggests that disputes over core consensus usually produce chain splits rather than universal agreement. On that basis, the report presents the idea as a debate point for now, not a sign that Bitcoin is close to changing its supply cap.