That's not how it works. The price is set on an exchange by supply and demand like any market. If bitcoin owners hold their supply, and buying interest mounts,

That's not how it works. The price is set on an exchange by supply and demand like any market. If bitcoin owners hold their supply, and buying interest mounts, the price will go up until an equilibrium between buyers/sellers is met (the "market price"). It's really no different from the stock market, except the asset is different. For the stock market the asset is company ownership, in the crypto market the asset is the cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency has value, frankly, because it has valuable properties. Currently as a convenient value store (think of Chinese investors storing wealth digitally instead of in NYC/Vancouver real estate), but the technology is developing so there's a lot of speculation that it could have further values we haven't discovered yet. The fact that investors are speculating on unknown future valuable properties of the tech instead of known cash flows is what makes crypto investing high risk - if the tech ends up truly being transformative then early investors will win big, if not then expect a bloodbath.