For what it's worth, with an older financial background, the gold standard of P/E ratios were made up at one point as well.
Financial statement analysis and GAAP are much softer indicators than gen pop tends to think. It comes out of a period before behavioral economics took hold, for instance.
> guess at the "true" value of cryptocurrency
How I do it is this:
It's understood today that the Internet fundamentally changed "something" inherent about how we access, interact with and move information. There was a cambrian explosion of availability, and we overtime determined there was some form of "value" to it. It's worth remembering that how to value it had no real peer to compare to in terms of competing information networks - would you price an internet company, or infrastructure like you would a book publishing company or news org? That valuation and how to invest in it broadly took the form of Internet companies, or data-rate charges from infrastructure owners. It's challenging to price the actual data in the network. Arguably, PII/customer data is so valuable because that's easy to price. It's tied to a discrete individual. But for raw information packets, that's more challenging to do for many reasons. So we know this information has value, but we can't easily price it like we can other commodities (1 piece of timber == $$, 1 TCP/IP packet == ?).
Financial transactions are also a form of information. But they didn't experience a correspondingly large boom relative to the full impact on information by the Internet. This is because financial transactions need to be provably discrete, and TCP/IP and related design concepts aren't a good fit for it (yes, packets in transit are discrete, but what I'm referring to goes beyond that). So, we've seen huge explosions of financial activity where it was a simpler financial tx -> internet packet like in heavily digitized financial exchanges, paypal, venmo, and the large uptick in tap-to-pay smart devices. However, we're still entering payment details manually in many payment settings, and the digitization of current finance still ends up requiring a significant amount of manual settlement behind the scenes. This is because it's challenging to prove that "1 digi-buck" is in fact a discrete digi-buck I own and I alone.
So, that's the value that cryptocurrency solved: how to send provably discrete financial data, without relying on a manual, centralized settlement system that's possibly corruptible (what cryptocurrency people would call trustless settlement). It moves the value proposition from the external parties around the internet (ISPs, companies, consumer data) directly into the data transacted, itself. And puts a price on that data.
In my mind, I think of what the Internet did to information, and what cryptocurrency does to financial information, then there's a clear value prop. Edit: the big unknown though is how the tradeoffs between a good-enough service like venmo vs. bitcoin impact user decisions. Digitized finance that's just "good enough" might be good enough for quite a large chunk of the population, and it'll be a long time before we see me paying you for beer in btc.
Hope that helps but also would love to hear counters.