"Profits generated by companies are often cited as the reason for stock values. But dividends paid by most companies are typically trivial."

Both of these are true. But why do you think these very well-known facts somehow refute the stock market?

The economic reason a company doesn't pay dividends is that re-investing in the company is projected to pay better than "cash" (which is basically Treasury notes, in the US).

As a stockholder, you actually own part of the company. It is to your economic advantage to keep increasing the value of that company, even if there are no dividends.

The classic example is DEC. This stock never paid a dividend, and eventually went out of business, and yet some early investors never sold and still made a huge return. The reason is that the liquidation value was so large because the company had grown tens of thousands of times from the start.

There's actual math behind this, and all these ideas have been known for over a century and appear early in any book on economics.

So many people's comments about cryptocurrency can be summed up this way - "I have never read or thought about economics past trying to justify things I want to be true."