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Pritam Gembali
It's July 11th, 2025. Time's flying. Bitcoin just hit its all-time high of $119,000 USD, only a few months after lingering in the $70-80k range. The buzz is palpable, and it led to a great question from a colleague at the office today.
"Hey," he asked, "Can I just create a coin, name it 'BTC', sell it to people, and get rich?"
"You absolutely can!" I replied. "The blockchain is permissionless. You can go right now and mint a token with the ticker 'BTC'. The real challenge isn't creating it; it's finding someone willing to pay you for it."
He thought for a second. "Okay, what if I sell just 0.000001 of my new 'BTC' to my mom for $0.119? I control all the other coins. Does that make me rich?"
And that's the million-dollar—or $119,000—question. Sure, you'd be rich if you measure your worth in your own "BTC". But if you want to measure your net worth in dollars, you need someone else willing to trade you real money for it.
This brings us to the core of it all: how does the real Bitcoin have value? The simple answer is that someone is willing to buy it for $119,000, and someone else is willing to sell it at that price. It's not $25 or $1 million because, at this very moment, this is the value we as humans collectively assign to it based on supply and demand.
But that feels like a circular argument. Why are we assigning any value at all to this "magic internet money"? To answer that, let's take a slight detour to Westeros. In Game of Thrones, Lord Varys poses a riddle: "Power resides where men believe it resides. It's a trick, a shadow on the wall."
Power resides where men believe it resides. It's a trick!
This "trick" is the foundation of almost every system of value we have. Governments have power because we collectively agree to grant it to them. A piece of paper with "100" printed on it has value only because we all believe it does. At what point does a cult become a religion? When a critical mass of people shares the same faith.
Humanity collectively believing in something gives that thing power.
So, is Bitcoin just a new religion? Yes and no. Yes, in that its value is powered by the shared belief of millions. But crucially, it is not blind faith. This belief is rooted in the fact that Bitcoin solves problems that our existing systems cannot.
The belief in Bitcoin isn't random; it's earned. It’s built on a foundation of unique, verifiable properties:
1. Verifiable Scarcity (The "Digital Gold" Property) Unlike national currencies that can be printed into oblivion, there will only ever be 21 million bitcoin. This limit isn't based on a promise; it's hard-coded into the system for everyone to see. You don't have to trust a person or a government not to devalue your savings. You just have to trust math. This predictable scarcity is a powerful reason to believe in its ability to hold value over time.
2. Decentralised Power (The Answer to Varys's Riddle) Bitcoin takes the "trick" of power and gives it to everyone. There is no CEO of Bitcoin, no central bank, no board of directors. Control is distributed across a global network of thousands of computers. This means no single person or government can shut it down, freeze your account, or block a transaction. This decentralisation is the system's core innovation.
3. The Problem It Solves (Trustless Value Transfer) For the first time in history, Bitcoin allows you to send value directly to anyone, anywhere in the world, without needing to trust an intermediary like a bank or a payment processor. The network itself validates the transaction. The fact that we now have a global network that enables censorship-resistant, permissionless value transfer is, in and of itself, incredibly valuable.
So, why does Bitcoin have value? Because people believe it does. And why do they believe? Because it is scarce, decentralised, and uniquely useful. It's a new kind of power—a shadow on the wall that anyone can cast.
