By "base value" I mean the minimum amount of labor and goods it commands as measured in units of Bitcoin. This tends to follow an exponential, however as you've seen, it's very difficult to quantify since everything else also shifts wildly due to its market conditions, including fiat itself. If you presume any price of bitcoin over this base value is speculation, and only serves to maintain its upward pressure (yet, is subject to continuous correction), then we can imagine a minimum value persists that is related to its issuance schedule. The "bull-run and bear market" cycle patterns are intrinsic to the nature of market adoption of Bitcoin, and perhaps necessary, to allow self-interested agents to contribute to grassroots marketeering of the new commodity. It could have just as easily been programmed to follow a continuous declination of issuance over time rather than a four-year stepwise halving schedule. Also, the issuance adjustment could have just as easily been more frequent. But no, we were given an issuance schedule that can not only be easily remembered, but provides enough time for the market to fully absorb the shock of its change. One might think Satoshi more than a cryptographic genius, but also one that either has an instinctual or a deep comprehension of market psychology. As I had once speculated by reviewing the very first check in of the codebase, I could glean that Satoshi had a corporate and Wall Street background in software. I believe the issuance schedule was carefully chosen based on some kind of ideal publicly traded asset behavior. Consider the automobile. We humans perceive our vehicles are more powerful and that we are "going faster" if the shift pattern of the transmission gearboxes is stepwise rather than continuous. The early manual shift transmission provides a stepwise torque curve out of mechanical necessity. Today, with the more reliable continuously variable (CV) gear mechanism, it is unnecessary to alter the engine RPM. Instead, it's feasible to hold the engine at a constant RPM at its peak power efficiency and deliver a constant acceleration to the car. The reason CV transmissions do not do this is that people not only expect to be jostled around during acceleration to traveling speeds, but people will call for more power to maintain the satisfying feeling of acceleration and, consequently, will use more fuel, wear and tear on the car, but also think the vehicle's performance is inferior and not recommend it to their peers. Essentially, the perfect transmission provides an imperfect experience. It's this sort of insight into human psychology the four-year halving appears to harness. In the end, we end up in the same place, 21M, but the process, although seemingly shocking, yields an overall gentler outcome. If you also accept that adoption will meet resistance from not only government policies but also out of self-interested individuals and organizations that lose power as a result of the transition, the changeover will also follow a corresponding exponential pattern that represents their gradual receding from wealth and prominence if only due to limitations on the human condition. This transition of power would contribute to the increase in base value of bitcoin to the economy. One might consider a world in the absence of this invention had no better alternative emerged to these inferior forms of money, and this allowed certain structures and groups such as banking families and cantillion beneficiaries to indefinitely maintain wealth and power with little interference.