How is that different from the stock market ? Maybe you have 'more ideas' but that would not prevent you to be wrong. In both case nobody can predict what will happen next
There are people out there who will pay for discounted income streams, and they put a pretty good floor on prices. There are people out there who will pay for book value when prices drop too far, and they provide a (different, weaker) floor on prices. There are people who will pay for brands and memes and so on, and they provide different floors again. And then throw in different discount rates, different projections of the future, different tastes, you get the picture.
None of these lower-bounds provides the price. If I have a company that just holds $1 in a bank account at 0% interest, an income-based valuation says it's worth $0, and a book-value based one says it's worth $1, so it's worth at least $1. But if I have a goose that lays $100 bills every day, it's worth a lot more as an income stream than it is in book value (as a goose.)
There are some things that provide upper-bounds. When prices are too high, companies should issue stock and (incidentally, not as a goal) drive the price down -- this is "raising money cheaply". But in practice this is usually a pretty weak force. The bitcoin equivalent (mining) might be stronger because there are more market participants on the supply side.
Anyway, with interest rates at zero, high savings and lots of spare time and boredom, the income- and meme-based lower-bounds are causing prices to do interesting things.
In other words, the price of a company is the present value of its future earnings. There is some speculation on what future earnings will be, but generally the valuation is about 20x last year's earnings, right now it's about double that.
If a company earns profits it can pay it out as dividend, or it can accumulate it as cash and gain equity.
Bitcoin doesn't have such a thing. There's no profit that bitcoin makes that gets paid out to its owners in dividend. And the price increases aren't related to its profits, either, it's really pure speculation, no different from tulip mania.
Bitcoins potential technical uses are real, but have no real world use case so far after 13 years. There's no killer app. And if there was, it still does not require bitcoin to have a trillion dollar market cap to function. The blockchain can function just fine at a fraction of it. You can write data to the blockchain with a millionth fraction of one coin, a tiny fraction of a cent.
As a store of value sure it has proved itself across what is a very short span of time in human history, but only because its speculative. It's not an argument that its a good store of value. In the end, its only based on a mutual fashionable agreement. Technically you can fork bitcoin and create infinite tokens. The scarcity is akin to every human on earth being an alchemist and and being able to make infinite variations of a gold metal, slightly different, and us artificially choosing on one (the first one) being valuable, and the rest not. For now... and then claiming it to be a good store of value. Time will tell. In any case, there's nothing but FOMO/speculation driving bitcoin valuations atm.
Let's say that a stock has value because of some combination of: 1. The underlying's earnings/cash flow, and 2. Speculation (I want to buy stocks that I think other people will want to buy)
But if you think about it, #1 is also just speculation. Because at the end of the day, you are risking $X to make $Y. You are placing a bet that tomorrow, some other people will come to value this stock (perhaps based on earnings) higher than you do today.
So basically, speculation has always been a thing and there are enduring assets whose price is more or less agreed to be entirely based on speculation and speculation alone (e.g. gold).
Some people buy stocks for dividends never expecting to sell them, and not especially worried if the price goes down after they buy. I guess the projection of dividends coukd be called "speculation", but I don't think that's what you meant when you used the term.
Other things that don't quite fit include bonds, especially short-term government bonds. If held to maturity, it's a stretch to say the value is a social construct in a meaningful way.
(Non-meaningful phrasings abound of course -- by some definitions my monthly rent is speculation, because law and order and property are social constructs and I'm betting on society not changing its mind on them, but again I don't think you were making that sort of facile point.)
The market is manipulated certainly, but that is not a justification for tech companies and developers to create crypto currencies to pump and dump.
Also the markets are regulated from registering trades by CEOs in advance to insider trading laws. Though far from perfect it’s no reason to waive a white flag and open the flood gates to unmitigated scams. And the only times it appears coin scams have resulted in any legal action and liability is under the guise of the existing securities laws.
Bitcoin is a bunch of hope, hot air, and hubris. I suppose you could say it's an industry of its own, but I think it's harder to project than, say, the tech industry.
Retail traders' emotional reaction to volatility really skews their perception. Professional traders are aware of this and take advantage.
With crypto, I don't have that same sense. I buy, it goes up, I'm a visionary genius. I buy, it goes down, I'm a fool. I can't really point to any reason why either scenario happens, no testable hypothesis. Other than a very few events, like the coinbase IPO, that is.
In general, I think trying to reason about assets over short periods of times typically comes down to emotions rather than fundamentals. Over longer periods of time, fundamentals can start to have some affect.
For crypto, I do think there is a narrative that can be pointed to for the run up over the past year - a mix of defi projects that are actually getting traction, scaling solutions for Ethereum allowing it to catch up to demand, and a general inflation scare that drives interest in fixed supply assets not controlled by a central party.