Most of the crypto price consists of speculative value. I'm sure that 95% of people involved would never invest in bitcoin or altcoins if they knew the price would be fixed. Hence, cancer pills of certain brand (which would be in limited supply despite the ingredient being open source) would be valuable if you could trade them online and make money flipping them with easy access available to everyone. People love gambling, stock markets, penny stocks, online casionos, sports betting are all blossoming and there's a lot of speculation hungry money in the world.
And by this you also say that Bitcoin is in essence worthless - and only holds whichever low price people emotionally attach to it - like the price of old pokemon cards
I don't disagree with you, but by the same logic gold is also (mostly) worthless, expect a minor part jewelry and industry, and yet marketcap is trillions. Most of gold value comes from speculation that people believe it will be valuable to others in the future. Even though most people don't need and don't use gold. It has become a store of value in minds of people, so it's possible bitcoin could do the same despite not having much use either.
But if we apply that comparison, gold to bitcoin, and make the assumption that bitcoin remains a store of value or a means of wealth creation, then we must compare the movements of the gold price to that of bitcoin. We can indeed then see a similarity of the price charts of the two. Gold, years ago, was worth just a small fraction of the value it achieved around a couple of years ago, which peaked somewhere around $19k/oz. Since then it's dropped to around $13k/oz and stayed there pretty much. So in two years it hasn't gone back up to its ATH.
So many people on this forum are expecting bitcoin to resurface around its $19k price sometime soon but, if we make that comparison with gold, that kind of price may be off a lot longer than they expect. It's very possible that bitcoin last month was where gold was two years ago.
One difference in the above analogy though is that gold is the cancer pill in the analogy. So although the analogy makes sense, I'm wondering if we're comparing apples with pears. Regardless, even as a store of value, bitcoin would not have infinite value! There has to be some price stabilisation somewhere.