[atleta]

Not really. Company stocks indeed do have an intrinsic value: companies pay dividends. Now they can go bankrupt, sure, but that's an independent issue. Indeed the very fact that they can go bankrupt (in which case your stock will probably be worth 0) shows that they have an intrinsic value.

So, as opposed to BTC, you don't have to buy it in order to sell it to someone else at a higher price. You can hold it and still make a real profit. (As opposed to the price increase, which you'll only realize if/when you do sell.) And since this is the case, it will mostly anchor the price in the long term to the profit (dividend) making capabilities of the stock.

So no, it's not always a bubble. You could argue that 'fiat' money is a ponzi/bubble but that also has intrinsic value (as the issuing central bank/government will stand up for it, e.g. force every merchant to accept it, you can pay taxes in it, etc.). But if you say that gold is a similar ponzi/bubble, then your probably right. While gold also does have intrinsic value (for its usage as a base material e.g. in electronics), its price is, as far as I can understand a lot higher than what that use would guarantee. (We use relatively little compared to how much we keep in safes.)

[charcircuit]

>companies pay dividend

Not all companies do that though. $GOOG has no voting rights nor dividends yet is worth more than $2100. It does literally nothing as far as I can tell, making it useless compared to even something like bitcoin. Despite this, you could have made a lot of money by just buying the stock years ago and selling it now.

>You can hold it and still make a real profit

That would take 33 years to happen with the stock that currently has the highest yield assuming that yield is constant over those 33 years which is probably a bad assumption. Who wants to get a profit 33 years in the future? If I could not resell it, it would be worthless to me.

With cryptocurrency you can also yield farm to make some money while you are just holding by essentially loaning them and having interest paid to you.