Interestingly a lot of the speculation - at least today - is actually a bet on disaster. Many wealthy individuals and institutions are buying Bitcoin as a hedge against currency collapse. It's not so much that they think Bitcoin will be worth more in the future: it's that they believe the U.S. dollar and all other financial assets will be worth less. (Or in some cases, it's just part of a hedge: the rest of the hedge fund's portfolio will increase in value under any situation other than collapse of the economy, while Bitcoin will massively increase in value if there's a collapse. There's value in uncorrelated returns.)
Fear is often a lot stickier than greed as an emotion. If you believe you're going to get rich quick and it doesn't happen, you reevaluate your choices. If you believe you're insuring against becoming poor and it doesn't happen, well clearly your insurance worked.
I'm not sure I agree with you. What we constantly hear is exactly that, hedging against global economic collapse. But I see no strong evidence that in the face of such an event, Bitcoin's price should rise.
What I see, instead, is a bet on this big speculation bubble to continue for another few years, hoping to cash out before it happens.
Like the original thread, I'm speaking descriptively, not normatively. People believe that in the event of a collapse, Bitcoin's value will rise. The evidence for that is a.) people say exactly that b.) people frequently compare Bitcoin to "digital gold", and gold has similar hedging properties c.) wealthy Bitcoin holders pay large sums of money for custodial services that store their private keys in nuclear-blast-resistant underground bunkers and d.) if they were hoping to cash out in the speculative bubble, they would've given up by now, with the current bear market lasting for nearly 2 years now.
Whether they're correct or not is a different matter, but correctness doesn't bear on their motivation for hodling. Nobody's going to know until the collapse comes or everybody gives up waiting, in which case either they're rich or dead.
Personally I think there's a certain sweet spot magnitude of a collapse where Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency will be useful, and it's where the political and financial system has broken down yet infrastructure remains intact. In other words, you still have power and Internet, but no effective central government. Something like Hong Kong or the Soviet Union but not as serious as Venezuela or Syria. Less than that and people will just use $USD; more than that and guns & food will be more useful than Bitcoin. (I suspect that the same people who are buying lots of Bitcoin are also stocking up on guns & food, too, though.)
Fear is often a lot stickier than greed as an emotion. If you believe you're going to get rich quick and it doesn't happen, you reevaluate your choices. If you believe you're insuring against becoming poor and it doesn't happen, well clearly your insurance worked.