It solves the urgent problem of the terrible scarcity of venues for financial speculation in an era of low interest rates and almost 0% real interest rates. Th

It solves the urgent problem of the terrible scarcity of venues for financial speculation in an era of low interest rates and almost 0% real interest rates. The economist Paul Krugman said that the cryptocurrencies had some of the same ballistics as gold, and gold does well when real interest rates are low, as people lack profitable investment opportunities and so they must seek increasingly aggressive and risky investments. The cryptocurrencies have the advantage over gold that they can claim to not be gold, nor any known thing, they can claim to be something completely new, with unknown dynamics. This allows for a certain amount of hype that simply wouldn't be possible for gold. And of course, in terms of ease of moving it around the planet, cryptocurrencies have some real advantages over gold, and therefore are probably stealing a lot of the risk taking that might have otherwise gone to gold.