I guess the prices are as such because of the fact that more and more influential figures with multiple million dollars in their name like Elon Musk adopting bitcoin in their investment portfolio. The fact that they dragged a massive following along with them while investing huge amounts of money as well made the price pump like that since last year. I'm pretty sure there are people who would assume such action is grounds for speculation, but I would disagree knowing that a majority of people who invested and held on to their bitcoins are in it because of the use-cases it can bring to the table.
Although bitcoin is currently around $63k, but this does not guarantee bitcoin will continue to be worth, this is because bitcoin has a decentralized concept so that the price goes up or down depending on the community, maybe the price will continue to rise because the community is getting bigger but we have to be realistic that one day bitcoins can be worthless.
This is really a concern that everyone has, I want to analyze it from pure buy and sell power angle
I have followed the price movement for many years. What I observed is that some kind of price stickiness in it, so it maximum crash 80-90 percent.
I think this is due to combined effects of 2 major driven factor:
1. dramatically reduced selling pressure when the price has gone down so much
(For those who bought the top, it doesn't matter if they sold at 90% loss or 100% loss, they have lost most of their investment anyway, so they end up do nothing and hodl, and this in turn reduce the sell pressure)
2. dramatically increased purchasing power of market buyers
(With same money, you can buy 10x more coins when price has crashed 90%)
That's why when it crashes 90%, the sell pressure will disappear and price will start to stabilise. As a result, if you could drive the price up 100x, even after the crash, you could raise the new bear market bottom to be 10x higher than the old bear market bottom. And that will draw new participants
A big limitation is the fiat money inflow channel, today many banks are restricting it, trying to starve the cryptocurrency market, but with the rise of USDT and other stable coins, it seems the community has find its own way of generating liquidity without fiat money inflow, this is the new development and will raise the price by a few magnitudes if keep going without restriction
This is a very sound explanation from an entrepreneurial perspective. Price pressure and price stabilization does play a role in ensuring that the price floor of bitcoin is kept in check even when it is bearish. Giving people opportunity to buy bitcoins at a much more favorable price point than years ago. I still don't think this solves the question of whether bitcoin is indeed a speculative asset or not, since there are still some parts of the whole thing about bitcoin that is not covered like the fact that it skyrockets when it does, but nonetheless a good explanation.