Yep and that's Bitcoin's network effect. There is demand for Bitcoin. 2017 was the year of retail interest, 2021 is the year of institutional interest. It's easy to see that the price is now uncorrelated with the retail interest, using Google Trends as an example. [0]
> there is no particular reason to believe that people will be more willing to pay over $45k to update ledgers to indicate possession of a particular alphanumeric string in a couple of decades' time than they are now
Absolutely. Nobody can know with certainty what will happen but if you compare Bitcoin with something like gold you immediately realize that Bitcoin is better in any possible way. There is literally no reason to think that Bitcoin won't replace gold in terms of market capitalization (except for the 7.5% actually used in manufacturing) [1].
> there is no particular reason to believe that people will be more willing to pay over $45k to update ledgers to indicate possession of a particular alphanumeric string in a couple of decades' time than they are now
Absolutely. Nobody can know with certainty what will happen but if you compare Bitcoin with something like gold you immediately realize that Bitcoin is better in any possible way. There is literally no reason to think that Bitcoin won't replace gold in terms of market capitalization (except for the 7.5% actually used in manufacturing) [1].
[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in...