You’re still not paying attention.
A veteran Bitcoin protocol developer stood up in front of a room full of developers and said the quiet part out loud: he wants to tax you for holding your own money. Not the government. Not a central bank. A Bitcoin developer. From inside the house.
Peter Todd — a core protocol contributor with a long history of controversial takes — publicly argued that Bitcoin should charge a demurrage fee of roughly 0.1% per year on every single address. Just for holding. Just for existing. And here’s the part that should make you angry: he claims this can be done as a soft fork. No hard fork. No community vote. No supermajority. Just miners and node operators signaling it through.
Todd’s argument is that transaction fees won’t be enough to pay miners after the last block reward around 2140. The network will become “insecure.” Miners will leave. Bitcoin will collapse “under its own weight.”
So his solution is to tax YOU to pay THEM.
The actual proposal is a tail emission of roughly 0.25 BTC per block starting around 2040, funded by burning transaction fees AND a demurrage tax on every holder. Todd’s own words: the chance of a hard fork changing Bitcoin’s distribution is “close to nil” — so he dressed it up as a backward-compatible soft fork that could slip through with miner signaling alone.
Calling a Tax on Holding a “Soft Fork” Is the Most Dangerous Rhetorical Trick in Bitcoin’s History
Soft forks are how SegWit activated. Soft forks are how Taproot activated. They’re supposed to be backward-compatible upgrades that tighten rules. They are not supposed to be a way to quietly rewrite the economic model while everyone is looking the other way.
If 0.1% can be added today, what stops 1% tomorrow? What stops a tenured developer from deciding your dust actually belongs to him?
Think about what this really requires: a tax on every address means tracking every UTXO, calculating balances continuously, and burning coins that don’t move. That’s not monetary policy. That’s a fundamental redesign of how Bitcoin tracks ownership — the exact surveillance-adjacent nightmare self-custody was invented to escape. You buy a hardware wallet to keep coins out of the bank’s hands, and the next proposal is to tax your address so the protocol knows exactly how much you’re sitting on.
The Timing Is No Accident
The development community is already fractured after the BIP-110 debacle, where a minority faction tried to fork the chain with a laughable 2.53% of miner support. Luke Dashjr lost his BIP editor position. The governance model is under strain.
Into exactly that chaos steps a “well-intentioned” proposal that happens to transfer value from holders to developers and miners. Todd is not some random Twitter troll — and that’s precisely why this is dangerous. He’s a core protocol contributor. When someone with credibility starts floating “soft fork” taxes, the Overton window moves. What was unthinkable yesterday becomes “worth discussing” today.
The Love Is Bitcoin Takeaway
The 21 million cap is the single hardest property Bitcoin has. It’s the property that separates Bitcoin from every fiat currency that has ever existed. It’s the property you’re actually buying when you hold. If that becomes negotiable through a “soft fork,” then Bitcoin’s scarcity becomes a suggestion, and your holdings become a line item in somebody else’s spreadsheet.
This is why self-custody and protocol vigilance matter more than ever. Not speculative. Not “number go up.” The fight over who owns your coins is happening at the code level now. Know your keys, know your node, and never outsource your opinion on monetary policy to a developer with a conference mic.
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So Here’s the Question
If a “soft fork” can tax you 0.1% today, what stops 1% tomorrow — and when the tax man finally comes for your stack, who are you going to trust with your coins?
Source: NostrMag coverage of Peter Todd’s remarks at the bitcoin++ conference in Toronto.
They Want to Charge YOU 0.1% a Year Just for HOLDING Bitcoin — and This "Core Developer" Says It's Just a "Soft Fork"
