You're not getting anything for free. For something to be valuable, someone has to value it. If someone values this chain, then they trade their fiat for your bitcoin. I could sell you a jar or farts. It's not valuable. But if you wanted to assign value to it, you could. I could also fork bitcoin RIGHT NOW and say this is the legitimate bitcoin. It's literally worthless, and I made it. It's only valuable if all of a sudden all of you decided I was correct and started accumulating it.