StarkWare CEO Proposes 4% Annual Inflation Rate for Bitcoin, Replacing the 21 Million Coin Cap

July 8th news, according to Cointelegraph, StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson posted on X, proposing to replace Bitcoin's 21 million coin hard cap with a 4% annual issuance rate. He believes the current hard cap is "unreasonable" because private keys are lost over time, "as time tends to infinity, all private keys will be lost." Ledger estimates that approximately 4 million bitcoins have already been permanently lost. Ben-Sasson stated that a 4% annual issuance rate roughly matches the global population growth rate. The proposal has met with strong opposition from the community. Opponents argue that the fixed cap is the core value of Bitcoin, and that Bitcoin is divisible to 2.1 quadrillion satoshis, which is sufficient to address the issue of declining available supply. Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox suggested that Bitcoin developers refer to the "network sustainability mechanism" that Zcash is considering — maintaining a fixed cap but allowing users to burn tokens, which would be gradually re-issued as block rewards over four years to alleviate miner incentive pressure without breaking the hard cap. Any such change would require consensus among Bitcoin developers, miners, and node operators, which is extremely challenging under a decentralized governance model.