Long term investors in stocks hope those companies generate value for others, producing profit, and that fundamental reasoning is why the stock should either go

Long term investors in stocks hope those companies generate value for others, producing profit, and that fundamental reasoning is why the stock should either go up or dividends be paid. Proxy capitalism. Money goes from everyone to the owners (wealth gap rises). That's not to say stocks aren't also priced by market dynamics of speculation and meme spread. However, very long term trends in stocks should beat inflation in the currency those stocks are most exposed to. Stocks are a liquid representation of the most productive asset you can own (the work of other people and technology), so a good deal of the money created ends up in the stock market. Plus, companies own various tangible assets. That reasoning creates a strong price dependence on money supply. Bitcoin's relatively fixed monetary base makes it theoretically stable under fluctuations in fiat monetary base. However, at the moment, partially due to low relative market cap of crypto compared to the entire stock market, meme spread and sketchy actors create huge amounts of price movement, leading to distrust. Long term that could definitely change but it also might not. Currencies have a network effect. Until critical mass is reached (historically by government sponsorship), the value of a floating currency will be unstable. Also, you mention Bitcoin is fixed-emission. This is true and worth noting - around 18.6M out of 21M coins are minted. Right now inflation is ~2.2%. Relative to fiat this is pretty low, and there's only ~13% inflation left. https://charts.bitcoin.com/btc/chart/inflation https://charts.bitcoin.com/btc/chart/inflation