[fastball]

Yes and no. I'll admit market cap alone doesn't demonstrate this, but market cap + trade volume does, unless you have reason to believe the majority of transactions are wash trading.

In your example it's $1 between two parties, in Bitcoin's case it was $17B over the last 24hrs between a huge number of parties, which indicates that a significant amount of value can be pulled out of BTC.

How much has been spent on mining hardware?