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I’m changing my Bitcoin rating to Incognito Unclear, which means I have no idea where the price is headed next, and it’s doing so well despite my skepticism that I’m wearing a paper bag over my head to hide my shame from the crypto tycoons.

Other assets are shining, too. Gold recently hit a new high. U.S. stocks have reached the point in the cycle where Bank of America calls the S&P 500 “egregiously expensive,” while predicting 8% more upside by year’s end. (It thinks average 10-year returns from here will stink, however.)

But Bitcoin has tripled over the past year, to a recent $67,000. I first wrote about it in June 2011 for something called SmartMoney.com, calling it the “top-performing money in the world.” It had climbed 200,000% in a year, to just over $10. If only I had sold everything and bet it on Bitcoin, I’d be pulling my superyacht up to Bezos’ right now to ask if he has any Grey Poupon. Instead, I continued plopping my pay into boring stocks and bonds and have achieved mere suburban comfort.

I’m too square to turn bullish now. But for those who are tempted by the new field of bitcoin ETFs—brands include Bitwise, iShares, Fidelity Investments, Invesco, and WisdomTree—or those who are wondering when to sell, it would be helpful if there were something more than future-of-money narratives to go by. How about math? The lack of cash flows makes that tricky, but there are creative workarounds. I reached out to a couple of Bitcoin analysts to talk about the models they use. I sniffed them over out of curiosity, not to endorse them. Let’s run through five.

J.P. Morgan has used this one. It treats Bitcoin like digital gold, because the two assets have things in common. Supply is limited; they’re fungible and divisible stores of value; they’re not under government control; and both are apparently durable—Bitcoin has outlived the publication where I first wrote about it. The value of all mined gold is estimated at close to $15 trillion, but much of that is jewelry, or else held by central banks. Gold held by private investors, including through bars, coins, and ETFs, is estimated at $3.3 trillion. Bitcoin’s market cap is around $1.3 trillion. If it’s as good as gold, maybe it should be trading at more than twice its current price.

JPM adjusts Bitcoin’s fair value downward for the fact that it has been more volatile than gold. Reda Farran, an analyst at financial information site Finimize, says that this adjustment is too harsh, because Bitcoin’s volatility has been falling. He also points out that Bitcoin has slower supply growth than gold, and in his opinion more financial utility, both of which warrant upward price adjustments. My main question: If Bitcoin is indeed as good as gold, wouldn’t that point to a substitution effect that would push gold’s price lower, not to record highs? Farran says the substitution effect is evident in ETF flows, but that central banks have been offsetting it by buying gold.

Sometimes analysts point to the cost of mining an ounce of gold as a peg for its price. This is possible with Bitcoin, which is “mined” using massive computing power, meaning that the marginal cost of production is tied to electricity prices, the efficiency of the hardware, and the rate at which miners are rewarded for their computations. This reward rate is engineered to halve every so often, slowing supply growth until it eventually halts, and as it turns out, the next halving is in April.

The anticipation of this, combined with the new demand from ETFs, is part of what has Bitcoin bulls so abuzz. One researcher who has studied using Bitcoin’s production cost as a valuation guide, Adam Hayes of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, predicted last year that it will cost about $75,000 to mine a Bitcoin after the halving. Finimize’s Farran says that production costs should be considered a price floor, not a fair value.

You know those Ibbotson charts that financial advisors point to that show the long-term performance of stocks, bonds, bills, and inflation? If they showed Bitcoin, too, the customers would say, “Give me some of that.” We should all say that, says Raphael Zagury, chief investment officer at Swan Bitcoin, which offers buying plans for the cryptocoin. He reckons that a 20% allocation is the ideal risk/return tradeoff, or as he puts it, “the optimal point on the efficient frontier.” This isn’t so much a pricing model as it is an argument for a higher price. But Zagury has two more models…

The world’s real estate is worth $320 trillion. Some portion of that reflects a “monetary premium,” or pure investment value beyond the practical value of the land and structures themselves. Call it 30%. There’s a chance, according to Zagury, that Bitcoin will become the world’s apex monetary asset, and devour this premium not just from real estate, but also from stocks, bonds, gold, silver, other cryptocurrencies, and fine art. Zagury has created a website, nakamotoportfolio.com, that allows users to enter their own assumptions. The default assumptions show, for example, a 5% probability that Bitcoin captures real estate’s 30% monetary premium over the next 20 years, and a 90% probability that it will grab other crypto’s 100% monetary premium over six years. Using those default assumptions, the calculator produces a fair value for Bitcoin of over $620,000.

A global collapse of so many financial assets at once brings to mind societal chaos on a Mad Max level. I’m not clear on how, in that world, internet coins will be the thing everyone covets. I mean, beef jerky, I could see. But then, I’m the guy who didn’t buy bitcoin at $10.

There are financial instruments that pay off in the event of a bond default. They’re called credit default swaps. There are CDS for Treasuries, even though the U.S. government can just make new money if it needs to. The presence of a Treasury CDS market implies some risk of default, however small. You can use the pricing in that market to calculate a default probability. If you assume that Bitcoin wins if Treasuries go kablooey, you can also use CDS pricing to calculate a fair price for Bitcoin. Zagury has. He gets between $75,000 and $100,000, “depending on your assumptions.”