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If I could time-travel back to 2008 and sit across from Satoshi Nakamoto, I would skip the bigger-blocks fight, the opcode wars, and the scripting language debates that have shredded this industry for years. Instead, I would beg him to change one specific design decision that I think doomed the entire experiment thus far.
The supply emission schedule. And while we are at it, the supply itself.
Hear me out before you reach for the maximalist torches. I built my career on the original Bitcoin, the unbounded one that scales. But there is a quiet flaw baked into the foundation that almost nobody sincerely talks about, and it is going to bite every chain that inherits the original issuance curve.
Including the one I work on every day.
The subsidy crutch
Satoshi gave Bitcoin a 50-coin-per-block reward and a halving every 4 years. The math is elegant. The marketing is incredible. “Only 21 million” is one of the greatest financial memes of all time.
But that long subsidy period created a side effect nobody priced in. It told an entire generation of builders and investors that the network does not need you to use it yet. The miners are being paid in fresh coins. Adoption can wait. Stack sats now and figure out the rest later.
Satoshi’s plan was the opposite. Read the white paper again. The block subsidy was always supposed to be a bootstrap. Transaction fees were supposed to replace it as the network grew. The whole point was that people would use Bitcoin so miners could get paid in fees while the rewards trailed off into nothing.
Instead, the long subsidy ramp gave the entire ecosystem permission to procrastinate. Twenty-year-old kids on Twitter still think the price chart is the product. The product is supposed to be the payment network.
The cliff that is coming
Here is what scares me when I do the math.
BTC transaction volume is shrinking, and BSV’s, despite tremendous capacity, isn’t great either because the Bitcoin culture was never taught to transact. Fees are shrinking with it, and the next halving cuts the subsidy again. The digital gold narrative actively discourages anyone from spending the asset, which is the one thing that pays miners after the subsidy disappears.
Run that out twenty more years and you get a chain with a tiny coinbase and a security budget that cannot defend the value it claims to store. That is a museum exhibit with armed guards that nobody is paying for.
BSV solves part of this with unbounded scaling. More transactions plus more fees equals sustainable security. Good. But we inherited the same halving schedule and the same 21 million cap, which means our miners are racing the same clock as the BTC guys. We have just bought ourselves more time to actually fill the blocks before the music stops.
What I would change
Two tweaks. Both surgical.
First, shorten the subsidy ramp. Then make the halving cycle faster, reduce the initial reward, or both. Force the network to grow into its security budget within 10 years, instead of 140. Make the builders feel a real deadline, not an abstract one that nobody alive today will live to see.
Second, never let issuance hit zero. Bake in a permanent tail emission. Something small. A fraction of a percent of supply per year, forever. Enough to guarantee a baseline coinbase for miners even if a fee market lags. Enough to keep the lights on.
Yes, that means Bitcoin would have a slight, persistent inflation rate. I can hear the Misesians sharpening their knives. I love Mises too. I have read Human Action twice, and I believe in sound money in my bones.
But I think the obsession with absolute scarcity has driven a generation of Bitcoiners genuinely insane. They cannot see the cliff because they are too busy worshipping the asymptote. They think a number ending in twenty-one million is the same as a functioning monetary system. It is not. A monetary system requires actual monetary activity. A network with no transactions is just a spreadsheet that costs a billion dollars a year to maintain, until it does not, and then it dies.
A tiny permanent emission is the price of admission for permanent security. Monero figured this out cleanly with a tail emission, and (sorry in advance) Peter Todd has suggested the same solution to solve a similar problem.
But truly, Bitcoin should have shipped it on day one.
The honest caveat
Before the angry mob beats down my door, let me clarify something:
It is more important for Bitcoin to remain set in stone than it is for me to be right about any of this. The whole point of this protocol is that nobody, not Satoshi, not me, not Craig, not the dev team du jour, gets to reach in and edit the rules. If we could change the issuance schedule because some podcaster on a Tuesday afternoon made a decent argument, we would have a central bank with extra steps and a worse user interface.
So I am not proposing a change. I am sitting here in 2026 wishing I could find a coffee shop in 2008 with one specific fellow and say, “I get it, friend, I really do! The curve is beautiful, but pull the tail emission forward. Trust me. The future you is going to hate the scarcity cult that this thing creates!”
The lamentation is the point. The protocol stays exactly as it is.
Be good to each other and go transact something.
This opinion piece is published to encourage discussion. The author’s views are their own and do not constitute legal, procurement, or policy advice, nor do they represent the positions of CoinGeek or its partners.
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