Bitcoin 21M Cap Under Fire From Zcash Founder
Eli Ben-Sasson, Zcash founder and and CEO of StarkWare, the company behind Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution Starknet, publicly argued that Bitcoin 21 million supply cap "doesn't make sense." He is also proposing instead that the network adopt a hard ceiling on the annual issuance rate.
Ben-Sasson's core argument centers on key loss. Because private keys are permanently lost over time, the coins attached to those keys remain on the ledger but fall out of practical circulation, making the usable supply unknowable and trending downward. His proposed fix: replace the fixed total-coin ceiling with a fixed inflation rate ceiling. His specific figure was 4% per year, which he described as "a reasonable upper bound on human population expansion."
The shift is from capping the stock of coins to capping the annual flow of new issuance, a distinction that sounds technical but carries enormous structural implications for every holder who priced Bitcoin's scarcity into their position.
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Zcash Co-Founder Right about Bitcoin?
Alongside the lost-key argument, the Zcash co-founder, Ben-Sasson, flagged Bitcoin miner security as a compounding concern. The block reward currently stands at 3.125 BTC following the April 2024 halving, and it will continue to decline on schedule, eventually reaching zero around 2140. As the subsidy shrinks, miners depend increasingly on transaction fee revenue to stay economically viable, and a network that cannot sustain miner participation becomes progressively more vulnerable to attack. Ben-Sasson described this risk as "looming large on the horizon."
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This part of the argument has genuine traction among protocol researchers, independent of whether one accepts the rest of Ben-Sasson's thesis. Bitcoin's long-run security model is a real open question – the assumption that fee revenue will fully compensate for the disappearing block reward is unproven at scale. Raising that issue does not require agreeing that the supply cap should change.
The lost-coin case is harder to quantify precisely. We estimated the effective circulating cap at roughly 18.5 million BTC once permanently inaccessible coins are excluded, with Ledger placing lost supply as high as 4 million BTC as of late 2024. Approximately 19.9 million BTC have already been mined, or around 95% of the eventual total, leaving only about 1.1 million BTC remaining to be issued over the next century-plus. The attrition from key loss is real.
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