Jack Mallers Says Bitcoin Supply Is “Stuck in Time.” It Does Not Guarantee the Price Rises

Strike CEO Jack Mallers told the Bitcoin Amsterdam conference that Bitcoin’s supply cannot be sped up by higher prices, more energy or more miners, unlike gold, which is dug out of the ground when prices rise. Social media posts turned the argument into a claim that Bitcoin’s design guarantees its price will only go up. Mallers’ point was about supply, and the price record does not support the stronger version.

Bitcoin was trading around $75,800 when the clip began circulating on Nov. 7, about 40% below its record of roughly $126,000 set on Oct. 6, 2025.

Summary

• Mallers said gold supply grows when its price rises, while Bitcoin’s supply is tied to a fixed ten-minute block schedule that money cannot speed up.
• Bitcoin’s issuance schedule is predictable: 21 million coins at most, 3.125 new BTC per block, and more than 20 million already mined.
• A fixed supply says nothing about demand. The schedule stayed the same while Bitcoin fell from about $126,000 to roughly $60,000 earlier this year.
• Mallers runs a Bitcoin payments company, and he has made the same argument since at least early 2024.

What Mallers said at Bitcoin Amsterdam

Mallers spoke at the Nov. 5–6 conference in Amsterdam, where he was scheduled for a keynote and a fireside chat on Nov. 6, according to the event agenda. His slide read “the price goes up” and compared gold, where a higher price brings more miners and more supply, with Bitcoin, where the supply stays the same.

He likened Bitcoin to a heartbeat that ticks about every ten minutes whatever people do. Miners, he said, do not make bitcoin but blocks, and money, energy or even government power cannot buy more time. Gold is stuck in the ground, he said, while new bitcoin is stuck ten minutes in the future. He added that money is an abstraction of time and energy, and that Bitcoin requires both to mine or to earn.

The argument is not new. Mallers told a conference in Madeira in early 2024 that to find more Bitcoin, “you’ve got to solve time travel,” CCN reported. Bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo shared the Amsterdam clip on Nov. 7, with a caption saying Bitcoin is “mathematically designed to go up forever.” That wording is Rizzo’s, not Mallers’.

#BREAKING 🚨 BOOOOM 💥💥JACK MALLERS JUST UNLEASHED A POWERFUL TRUTH ABOUT BITCOIN! He explained how Bitcoin’s mathematical design guarantees its value will only continue to rise. Unlike gold, where higher prices encourage more mining and increase supply, Bitcoin operates on a limited supply. This makes it inherently deflationary. As demand grows, scarcity does its magic, driving the price up!THIS NARRATIVE IS A GAME-CHANGER! We’re not just talking about investment; we’re on the verge of a financial revolution. With Bitcoin-backed products and global access, this could ignite a new era of digital finance. The road ahead looks explosive for adoption and use cases.WE ARE SO EARLY! 🌍🚀

— Bitcoin Hopium (@BitcoinHopium) November 8, 2026

How the ten-minute schedule works

Bitcoin’s rules aim for one block about every ten minutes. Every 2,016 blocks, roughly two weeks, the network resets its mining difficulty according to how fast the last blocks arrived. If more miners join and blocks come faster, difficulty rises until the pace returns to about ten minutes. Extra hardware can briefly speed up blocks, but it cannot change how many coins each block creates.

Each block creates a fixed reward, which halves every 210,000 blocks. The reward is now 3.125 BTC, and the supply limit is 21 million, according to Wikipedia’s summary of the protocol. Circulating supply stood at about 20.06 million in June, so roughly 95% of all bitcoin exists. The next halving, expected around 2028, will cut the reward to 1.5625 BTC. These limits are enforced by software rules that nodes follow, so changing them would take broad agreement.

A fixed supply is not a guaranteed price

Supply is one half of a price. The other half is demand, and the demand side has been weak. Bitcoin was down 32% a year after its record, CoinDesk reported in October. It fell to a cycle low near $59,000 earlier in 2026, according to Yahoo Finance, before recovering to the mid-$70,000s. Bitcoin’s issuance schedule was identical throughout.

Several things can move the price while supply stays predictable: interest rates, exchange-traded fund flows, leverage and risk appetite. One investing site described Bitcoin a year after its peak as trading like a rates bet, not an inflation hedge. For the latest drivers, see our report on why Bitcoin fell to $75,000.

Disinflationary, not deflationary

Posts about the talk call Bitcoin “inherently deflationary.” That is not quite accurate. Bitcoin’s supply still grows every block until around the year 2140, though more slowly each halving. At 3.125 BTC per block and 144 blocks a day, new issuance is about 164,000 BTC a year, or roughly 0.8% of supply by our calculation. The more precise term is disinflationary: new supply keeps arriving, at a falling rate, until it stops.

Who is making the argument

Mallers is the chief executive of Strike, a company built on Bitcoin payments, and he has a business reason to promote the case. His talk also made a narrower claim than the posts about it. A predictable supply is a real feature that gold lacks. Whether it lifts the price depends on whether enough people want to buy, and that has changed repeatedly.

What to watch next

• Whether Bitcoin holds the mid-$70,000s or retests its 2026 low near $59,000.
• Exchange-traded fund inflows and outflows, a key source of demand this year.
• The next difficulty adjustments and miner revenue as the block reward shrinks toward the 2028 halving.

Read more: Why is crypto down? What’s behind the crash and will it recover

This article is for information only and is not investment advice. Bitcoin’s price is volatile and can fall as well as rise.