Bitcoin News
By Steven Anderson
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Back Calls It a Misleading Narrative. Adam Back's objection isn't just technical — it's political.
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Hard Fork Math Makes This Nearly Impossible. Here's the thing about actually changing the supply cap: it can't happen through a soft fork.
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Bitcoin's two most recognizable cypherpunks are fighting. Adam Back and Peter Todd are publicly at odds over whether Bitcoin's 21 million supply cap should ever change — and the…
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Todd's position is pretty clear: once all Bitcoin is mined, around 2140, miners won't earn block subsidies anymore. They'll rely entirely on transaction fees.
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Adam Back's objection isn't just technical — it's political. He thinks Todd's framing is misleading, and he's drawing direct parallels to BIP-110, a soft fork proposal in 2026…
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Commentator Trey Sellers has made a similar point — that any attempt to touch the supply schedule would probably die the same death as BIP-110.
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Former Ripple CTO David Schwartz has also joined the broader conversation, though where exactly he stands isn't entirely clear from what's been said publicly.
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Here's the thing about actually changing the supply cap: it can't happen through a soft fork. A soft fork only needs miner cooperation.
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More context: Cboe Files for 3x Leveraged Bitcoin and Ether ETFs, Putting SEC in the Hot Seat
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Soft forks are already hard. BIP-110 proved that. A hard fork to change the supply cap would be orders of magnitude harder, and probably orders of magnitude more divisive.
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And there's no deadline forcing anyone's hand. The block subsidy doesn't hit zero until around 2140. That's well over a century away.
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That doesn't make the debate pointless. Miner incentives matter now, not just in 2140. The economics of Bitcoin mining are already shifting as halvings continue to cut the…
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Todd's camp thinks waiting is reckless. Back's camp thinks changing the cap is even more reckless. Neither side is blinking.
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More context: Edelman and Tudor Investment Make Major Moves in Bitcoin ETFs
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What's probably true is that the 21 million cap is, at this point, close to untouchable — not because it's technically impossible to change, but because the social consensus…
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