What does intrinsic value mean?
Let's see. We define intrinsic as something inherent, inborn, natural, deep-roted or permanent. Something that is essential. An important characteristic of a person or a thing.
So, gold has intrinsic value because it's limited in supply, and because it has some utility. But even more important - it just has. When the Europeans came to China, they found out that the chinese valued gold highly as well. When they came to south america..the same thing.
Sure it's pretty, but there are other metals that has much more utility, and many are even more scarce - Gold makes a terrible armor. It's not the best conductor. And some might argue it's not as pretty as other precious metals. But there is a common consensus that gold is valuable.
What gives gold the most intrinsic value though is it's scarcity and "reputation"/history of being a store of value. In the past anyone accepted gold as payment. Or silver. There was consensus. People thought it had value because of it's attributes.
Yup. This sucked. No point of doing more development. Just give up instead.
Nothing comes pre built out of the box
The most common argument, which by the way is a retarded argument - just to be clear, is that cryptos doesn't have intrinsic value. This is of course 100% wrong.
This wrong assumption comes from the wrong-think that cryptos aren't perfect, yet. People are unhappy with cryptos because they're not functioning like they wish to picture it functioning in the future. To compare, their complaining would be like listening to some Internet sceptic in 1993 - saying that Internet is bullshit and has no value, because what do we really need the possibility of sending messages to each other for? Or even a file. How can THAT change the world? Sure..it might be good for some people, and for criminals not to say the least. Criminals could use Internet to send messages!
Now, anyone would of course just laugh at that and say..well, perhaps we should let the Internet evolve. Let's calm down for a second and give it some time. Perhaps people will figure out how to utilize this new technology that we have no. And sure enough, soon people were chatting, making blogs, sharing information, reading news, watching videos and soon we have virtual reality worlds and augmented reality. Just 25 years later.
Crypto Currencies have a lot of different intrinsic values. It has a lot of potential use cases.
One, and perhaps the most important one is economic safety and freedom. Remember when India banned people from owning gold? All of a sudden, the intrinsic value for gold was lowered. Because, how would a person with gold get the gold out of India? With Cryptos though, much easier. Also, it has transparency, and this is of course something governments and central banks don't like - because their whole system is based on fraud. A inter-generational ponzi scheme that will have a devastating impact on future generations.
Also, don't forget the actual utility of being able to transact peer2peer on a secure system. The very foundation of Crypto Currencies. No need for third parties. Low transaction fees, and everything recorded on the Public Ledger. Sure, right now this does not function optimally, but it will in the future. It is also of course limited in supply, and it costs electricity to mine.
But Crypto Currencies does not only have intrinsic value when it comes to being a currency. It goes beyond that with smart contracts, token distribution, crowd funding and ways peer2peer investing. Anyone can invest in a start up now. Easy as hell.
Furthermore, Cryptos will provide incentive to invest time and effort into things. Computer games for instance. You spend a lot of time earning in game currencies and weapons and stuff, and all of a sudden the developer dumps stuff into the game because others who don't want to do as much work cries to the developers until they obey. Not with crypto-based economies in games. Everything will have a limited supply. So your hard earned space ship will become worth a lot in time. Your unique sword might sell for 100 dollars tomorrow and 200 dollars next year. Imagine laissez faire free market games.
Imagine food safety, companies like Wabi using smart contracts to make sure the food your child eats is the food that you intended it to eat.
Imagine decentralized Internet, like Substratum, making it difficult for corrupt governments to control information.
Imagine written history. In the future, the bullies can no longer write history as they want. All historic events will be recorded on the Public Ledger and digital archeologist can find out EXACTLY what happened at any given time in history.
So not only does Cryptos have intrinsic value in form of being useful for transactions (transaction speed, security, transparency) privacy and even a store of value because of it's deflationary nature (which is good! deflation is not bad..there I said it) It has value because it can interconnect industries and supply chains through smart contracts making things much more precise and safe and open.
So there you have it. Cryptos might go up and down for years to come. But if you are selling now, and especially at lower prices than this (btc 6-7000) you are just giving your future wealth away to whales. Simple as that. Think about that. The fundamentals in cryptos are rock solid.