The Question Everyone Asks
When someone first hears about Bitcoin, the question always comes: "But why does it have value? It's just bytes on a computer. I can't hold it. How can it be worth anything?"
It's a fair question. Bitcoin has no cash flow, no company behind it, no government guarantee, no physical metal in a vault. It's information on computers all over the world. So why would anyone pay $60,000 for it?
Jack Mallers tackled this question from first principles in a Bitcoin 101 episode, and the answer is simpler than you'd think. It doesn't require knowing anything about cryptography or blockchain. It just requires understanding what value actually is.
What Makes Anything Valuable?
Before we talk about Bitcoin, let's talk about money in general.
Gold has been valuable for thousands of years. Why? Because it's scarce. You can't just print gold. To get it, you have to dig it out of the ground, which costs real labour, real equipment, and real energy. The effort required to find and extract gold is what makes it hard to get, and that difficulty is what gives it value. Nobody can just wave a hand and create more of it.
Fiat currency (Jamaican dollars, US dollars, euros) is different. Governments can create as much as they want, whenever they want. When the Bank of Jamaica or the Federal Reserve decides to print more money, the existing money in your pocket becomes worth less. Not because you did anything wrong, but because there's now more of it chasing the same amount of goods. That's inflation. It's why a patty that cost $50 in 2015 costs $180 today.
The fundamental difference: gold is hard to produce, fiat is easy to produce. Hard money holds value. Easy money loses value.
Where Bitcoin Gets Its Value
Bitcoin takes the best property of gold, the fact that it's hard to create, and makes it absolute.
1. Proof of Work: Energy Becomes Money
New Bitcoin is created through a process called mining. Mining is essentially a massive computational competition. Computers around the world solve mathematical puzzles, and the first one to solve each puzzle earns new Bitcoin.
Here's the key: these puzzles require real electricity to solve. Real energy. Real cost. You cannot create Bitcoin without spending power. Mallers calls it "energy currency" because it must be created through time and energy, which gives it scarcity and inflation resistance.
This is called proof of work. The concept is exactly what it sounds like. To create Bitcoin, you have to prove you did work. Real, measurable, verifiable work. Not a promise, not a government decree, not a spreadsheet entry. Actual energy spent solving actual problems.
When a gold miner digs a hole, nobody can see the effort from across the world. But with Bitcoin, the entire network can verify that the work was done. Every transaction, every new block, every newly created Bitcoin is publicly recorded on a ledger that anyone can check.
2. The 21 Million Cap
There will never be more than 21 million Bitcoin. This is written into Bitcoin's code at the deepest level, and it's enforced by every single computer running the Bitcoin network worldwide.
No CEO can change it. No government can change it. No vote can change it. To change the supply limit, you would need to convince more than half of all Bitcoin miners, node operators, and developers to agree simultaneously, and even then, anyone who disagreed would simply keep running the original rules. The network would split, and the original Bitcoin would continue unchanged.
Compare that to fiat. The US money supply (M2) grew from about $15 trillion in 2020 to over $21 trillion by 2024. That's $6 trillion of new dollars created in four years. Each new dollar makes the ones in your pocket worth slightly less. With Bitcoin, that's mathematically impossible.
3. Verifiable, Not Just Promised
Jack Mallers demonstrated this powerfully at Bitcoin 2026, launching a live, on-chain proof of reserves that let anyone verify holdings in real time.
With gold, if a bank or government says they have 1,000 tonnes of gold in a vault, you have to trust them. You can't see inside the vault. You can't count the bars yourself. History is full of cases where gold that was supposed to be in a vault turned out not to be.
With Bitcoin, you don't have to trust anyone. The blockchain is public. If someone claims they hold 100 Bitcoin, you can check the address yourself, right now, for free, from your phone. No auditor needed. No quarterly report to wait for. The proof is built into the system.
This is what gives Bitcoin a "structural advantage" over gold. It's not just that Bitcoin is scarce like gold. It's that Bitcoin's scarcity can be independently verified by anyone, at any time, without asking permission.
4. Self-Custody: Your Keys, Your Money
When you hold gold, someone has to store it. Usually a bank, a custodian, or a vault company. If they get robbed, go bankrupt, or decide to freeze your account, you lose access. You're trusting them.
When you hold Bitcoin properly, in your own wallet, you hold a private key. A string of letters and numbers that only you have. Whoever holds that key controls the Bitcoin. No bank in between. No custodian. No permission needed to send it, receive it, or store it.
If you keep your key safe, nobody can take your Bitcoin. Not a government, not a bank, not a hacker. This is what people mean when they say "not your keys, not your coins." It's the difference between owning money and having an IOU for money.
Why This Matters for Jamaica
Jamaicans already understand hard money intuitively. We've watched the Jamaican dollar lose value for decades. We've seen what happens when a government controls the money supply. We know what inflation feels like at the grocery store.
Many Jamaicans already hold US dollars as a savings strategy, because the JD keeps losing ground. But US dollars are still fiat. The Federal Reserve can and does print more of them. Bitcoin offers something neither the JD nor the USD can provide: a fixed supply that can never be diluted.
And through the Lightning Network, Bitcoin isn't just a savings technology. It's spendable. Instantly, for fractions of a cent in fees. A higglers at Coronation Market can receive Bitcoin from a customer in Kingston, or from a family member in London, in seconds, without a bank account, without a fee, without asking anyone's permission.
That's the full picture. Bitcoin is valuable because it's hard to create, impossible to inflate, independently verifiable, and self-custodial. It takes the concept of gold and makes it digital, transparent, and accessible to anyone with a phone.
The Simple Version
If someone asks you why Bitcoin has value, here's what you tell them:
- It costs real energy to make (proof of work, like mining gold)
- There will only ever be 21 million (no printing, no dilution)
- You can verify it yourself (no trusting banks or governments)
- You can hold it yourself (no custodian needed)
Gold was the best money humanity had for 5,000 years. Bitcoin is gold for the internet age, with none of gold's weaknesses. That's not hype. That's just how the system is built.
Jack Mallers calls it honest money. For a country that's seen what dishonest money does, that might be the most compelling pitch of all. Credit to him for explaining it clearer than most.