> If you start from scratch with a non-exchange wallet and get paid in BTC for something to it, sure.

I believe the original idea was that, to start from scratch, you would just leave the Bitcoin software running on your computer for a while, since that software not only hosted your wallet but also contained a miner. After a while, you would get lucky and receive 50 Bitcoins.

Of course, that stopped working once mining moved to FPGA and then to ASIC; even with GPU mining software, an individual user has no hope of mining any relevant amount of Bitcoin. That bootstrap mechanism is now completely dead, and the only way to get new Bitcoins is to get them from someone, buy them in an exchange, or invest lots of money in specialized Bitcoin mining hardware.