It's not all about speculation; the cryptocurrencies have real use cases that justify part of the valuation. Currently, the majority of the countries in the world issues non-fungible currencies. It's reasonable hard and expensive to move money in and out of China, Brazil, Malaysia, amongst others. If you are moving money to Brazil or China, you get a nice a fatty FX spread using cryptocurrencies. It accounts for two things: the cost of offshore incoming deposit and the demand as value reserve in those countries. The FX spread is as high as 20% in Brazil; so, an ordinary FX of USD.BRL of 3.50 for tier 1 banks would yield 3.30 for an average customer using traditional remittance systems but could get as high as 4.20 using Bitcoin or Ripple. Take into account that Brazilians and Chinese don't trust that much their currency, they would rather save money in an asset that governments can't control. The world economy isn't all about the western countries anymore; you need to mind the new actors. Everyone trading cryptocurrency does know that Chinese are the ones dictating the moves (crazy ones, by the way) in some major coins. Ethereum is going through correction now; there are real technical challenges and open issues, but this happened before for Bitcoin as well. I understand that for a great parcel of western investors the cryptocurrencies have no apparent value at all; that everybody is running after the Dutch tulips. People can move money from the UK to the US or from France to Japan with reasonable speed and cost using traditional remittance. But if you are such a person, remember that guys like me (Brazilian) can't move money quickly and cheaper from the UK to Brazil within traditional banking. You may not notice, but Brazilians are always top 5 foreigner spenders in the US, and Chinese are the top spender tourists of the world. Don't be restrained by your western closed box, raise your head and check around, that's my advice.