StarkWare Chief Advocates for Dynamic Bitcoin Inflation

Eli Ben-Sasson, CEO of StarkWare, proposed replacing Bitcoin's fixed supply cap of 21 million with a 4% annual issuance rate. He argued that the current cap doesn't make sense because private keys are lost over time and eventually all keys will be lost. According to Ledger, up to 4 million Bitcoin had been burned or permanently lost by November last year.

Ben-Sasson still supports a hard upper bound on Bitcoin's supply but believes a 4% annual inflation rate would better track the growth of the human population. He claims that this would preserve the scarcity of Bitcoin, which is one of its core selling points.

Critics argue that changing the cap would undo what makes Bitcoin unique and make it more like other cryptocurrencies. However, Ben-Sasson maintains that Bitcoin's divisibility into 2.1 quadrillion satoshis doesn't change the fact that lost keys will eventually trend toward zero.

Zcash founder Bryce 'Zooko' Wilcox suggested that Bitcoin developers follow a proposal currently being considered in the Zcash ecosystem, which would allow users to burn tokens and reissue them as block rewards over a four-year period. This could ease pressure on miner incentives without lifting the hard limit on supply.