A lot of them have inherent value. When you use Stripe to pay for something, you pay a transaction fee. When you use Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, you al

A lot of them have inherent value. When you use Stripe to pay for something, you pay a transaction fee. When you use Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, you also pay a transaction fee (which is often much lower than what you would pay with a standard gateway; particularly with large transactions). That's profit; the profit gives intrinsic value to the network. The bitcoin network is quite slow and power hungry, so as a result the BTC transaction fee is now over $4 which is high; the BTC network is saturated due to high demand; so that's why we need altcoins to add capacity. There aren't enough altcoin networks to handle the demand for crypto-transactions. A blockchain does not scale unfortunately (each one has a hard physical throughput limit), so the best way to scale a block chain is to add more side chains (which is what alt-coins are; you can think of them as specialized shards of Bitcoin). It's like the Domain Name System - There is a hierarchy of machines and networks which together can handle a massive volume of domain name lookups. Any network which proves itself to be a trustworthy and reliable way to transfer money has intrinsic value which is determined by the present or future value of the network of services around it.