[hans1729]

>people want to buy it, and people also want to sell it. That means there's a market and therefore a value to it for those people.

People don't want to sell it, they have to, in order to pay the electricity bills for the mining (in their countries normal currency, for that matter).

There is no inherent value - you can only sell if the exchanges find someone who is willing to buy.

The value to the seller is the Dollar/Euro they get at the exchange. The value for the buyer is speculation on the price, which someone else then has to pay at the exchange in normal currency. There is exactly zero value in crypto itself.

[DrBazza]

Not at all - I can buy a bitcoin now, and then sell it, having not mined it.

I choose not to. But other people do.

> Money has value because of the value of the economic transactions in which its conducted.

As the OP said, little pieces of paper have essentially no intrinsic value. But use it for transactions, and it has suddenly has a value forced on it. We've all seen zombie apocalypse films with cash blowing around in the street and the survivors ignoring it for good reason, no one _values_ it.

Bitcoin is the same, it's a bit of paper in the sense that it's just some numbers on disc somewhere with no _intrinsic_ value, yet as soon as it's a medium of exchange, _which it is_, it has value. There are transactions made in bitcoin.