The crypto community rejected a proposal to change Bitcoin’s supply cap of 21 million coins

Eli Ben-Sasson, co-founder of the cryptocurrency Zcash, has publicly proposed revising one of Bitcoin’s fundamental principles—the capped supply of 21 million coins.

In his view, BTC’s fixed limit «makes no sense» from a practical standpoint. His main argument is that users eventually lose their private keys, meaning the actual number of available coins is steadily decreasing.

As an alternative, Ben-Sasson proposed introducing a model with a predictable annual supply increase of up to 4%. According to his reasoning, this would help maintain a stable supply in the market even when accounting for coins that have been irretrievably lost.

The Bitcoin community reacted extremely negatively to the idea. A fixed emission limit is traditionally considered one of the key advantages of the first cryptocurrency—it is precisely this limit that provides protection against inflation and makes Bitcoin «digital gold.»

Any change to this parameter would require consensus among developers, miners, and network users—which, in practice, is a nearly impossible scenario given the philosophy of the Bitcoin movement.