https://cointelegraph.com/news/starkware-ceo-suggests-4-annual-bitcoin-inflation-to-replace-21m-capOn Tue, Eli Ben-Sasson, the CEO of StarkWare Industries, an Isreali crypto company, estimated to be worth around a few billion dollars,
posted on X the below message which got picked up by some crypto related news portals:
Capping the supply of Bitcoin at 21M doesn't make sense. Beacuse over time, keys will be lost. In fact, as time goes to infinity, all keys will be lost.
I strongly support a clear monetary policy with an absolute upper bound on the # of Bitcoins in the future. Say, fix a max issuance rate and you get that (a good choice is 4% a year, this is a reasonable upper bound on human population expansion).
This way, you ensure there's enough to go around.
And I'm not even talking about the security problem, looming large on the horizon.
Of course, his opinion can be discarded, and given his company's involvement in the development of ETH, you could question whether any of his advice for Bitcoin is made in good faith, but does he have a point?
It's more of a purely theoretical topic or a thought experiment, but is Bitcoin at any risk of disappearing completely as time goes by (e.g. hundreds of thousands of years from now)?
I think it's true that Bitcoins will always keep disappearing, but, at the same time, I don't think we will ever realistically reach zero.
I see this as being similar to the so-called Race Course paradox, i.e., you travel from point A to point B, you must first travel half the distance. Once there, you must travel half of the remaining distance, and so on. Meaning you will always keep moving, but will never reach point B.
