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.