I think ever since people have stopped using gold and silver bullion (after arrowheads and knives) as currency items, there has been this consensus that money has the value that people give to it, not the value of its material (or, in BTC's case, immaterial) representations.
What exists with BTC is 21 million or so unique valid hashes and no others can be created. With money, say USD, there exist trillions and no guarantee that some party (the government) will not create massive amounts of additional units.
Would the BTC become completely worthless immediately?
But the algorithms behind Bitcoin are agreed on literally by consensus, the clients in the network which reach a majority are in control.
If it became clear that something in Bitcoin was about to be broken, the algorithm could be changed to something more secure, if a majority agreed.
Past transactions would not be affected - they are immutable - and new ones would become safe.
They have no conception of how to value the underlying asset because the underlying asset has absolutely no value. Bitcoin is one of the purest scams that has ever been conceived. Even subprime real estate, pets.com stock, dutch Tulip Bulbs etc. had some value. You're buying and selling a hash - a number. It's absolutely worthless. That people are being suckered into buying these, ASICs costing tens of thousands and backordered to make them etc. is a real close-up seat to how a bubble works, how a scam works, and how the luminaries in the tech field can be lined up in a row to endorse the scam. Is there a tech bubble? "Bitcoin" is the word that can answer that question as easily as "pets.com" and "Webvan" did 15 years ago. At least those companies actually performed a valuable service, Bitcoins are worthless.