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BTC 
ZEC StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson once again sparked discussions about a fixed supply cap for Bitcoin (BTC) in a post posted on Platform X on July 7. He advocated changing the 21 million hardtops limit to a 4% annual circulation rate.
Ben-Sasson said the current hardtop is \"meaningless\" because private keys are lost over time,\"when time goes to infinity, all keys will be lost.\" He added that an annual inflation rate of 4% is roughly in line with global population growth, and said he still supports some form of hard supply caps, but does not endorse the existing ones.
This argument is based on a real and well-documented phenomenon. Cryptocurrency hardware wallet provider Ledger estimated in November 2025 that up to 4 million BTC pieces had been destroyed or permanently lost, accounting for a considerable portion of the total supply, and these coins could never be spent or recovered.
Argument for a fixed cap
The 21 million Bitcoin supply cap has long been the core of its value proposition. It draws on the economic thinking of the Austrian school, which believes that a fixed money supply is a means to counter currency devaluation and a mechanism to maintain purchasing power over the long term. Many members of the Bitcoin community believe that modifying the cap will remove the core features of BTC that distinguish it from other assets.
Some Bitcoin supporters go even further, arguing that losing the key actually strengthens Bitcoin\'s supply-and-demand dynamics by permanently removing the coin from circulation. Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor has said he plans to burn his Bitcoin private key when he dies, calling it a \"proportional contribution\" to other BTC holders, making their coins more scarce.
Community opposition and another proposal
Ben-Sasson\'s post quickly drew criticism. One X user countered that Bitcoin can be divided into 21 trillion basic units of \"satoshis\", so there will always be enough units available. Ben-Sasson responded that these units would also tend to zero over time due to lost keys. Others believe that introducing any inflation rate would make Bitcoin indistinguishable from other cryptocurrencies; Ben-Sasson responded that as long as the inflation rate itself remained unchanged, scarcity would be guaranteed.
Zcash (ZEC) founder Bryce \"Zooko\" Wilcox proposes an alternative path and points to a proposal being considered in the Zcash ecosystem. The Zcash Network faces similar long-term challenges because it also relies on miners to ensure network security and has a fixed supply cap of 21 million ZECs.
The proposal, called the \"Network Sustainability Mechanism,\" would keep ZEC\'s hardtop unchanged while allowing users to destroy tokens, which would be gradually reissued as block rewards over a four-year period, easing the pressure on miners \'incentives without removing the supply cap.
Whether a similar approach can be applied to Bitcoin is another question. Any protocol-level changes to the Bitcoin network require consensus among developers, miners and node operators, a process that has historically been slow and controversial given Bitcoin\'s decentralized governance structure.
