I understand and accept everything in your two paragraphs. Nowhere have I asserted that knowledge about a company's past performance is an assurance against fut

I understand and accept everything in your two paragraphs. Nowhere have I asserted that knowledge about a company's past performance is an assurance against future loss. And yes, people with a lot more time, resources and information than I have bake a lot of information into their attempts to establish what an appropriate value is for a share of a publicly traded company. Nowhere in the preceding have I claimed an ability to out-predict wall street. But the fact that people after examining the data can be left with real uncertainty about the future prospects of a company doesn't mean the data doesn't matter. The equivalent data simply does not exist for BTC. Roughly, BTC is being used like shares in a company which owns no assets, has no revenue, gives no dividends, and writes no quarterly reports. Based solely on the price history, trading volume, number of shares outstanding (and constraints on shares issued in the future), and the press, people buy and sell it. To pretend that this in no way limits the ability of people to price BTC in comparison to their ability to do the same for stocks, bonds or other traditional assets seems unhinged.