To say Bitcoin has no inherent value is not quite accurate. The inherent value of the Bitcoin comes from the electricity required to power the computational cycles to "create" it.
If I smash the hope diamond and then get the pope and four world leaders to urinate on it— then surely the resulting mush would be the most rare and costly constructed substance on earth. It would also be worthless.
That's the printing/minting cost of conventional currency.
To have "inherent" or "intrinsic" value means that the actual material has marketable value. For a US dollar coin, if you melted it down, the copper, maganese, nickel and zinc is worth about $0.06. The value of the paper of a US dollar is a fraction of a penny for recycling purposes.
A bitcoin is more like paper currency -- it has no intrinsic value. But because of the predetermined control of new coin production, it will display characteristics similar to silver or gold coinage.
Those characteristics include something that nobody talks about -- the "discovery" of new coins. There are likely large dark pools of bitcoin that the initial adopters generated very cheaply. Dumping those pools on the market will have similar effects that gold rushes had.
"It's a common misconception that Bitcoins gain their value from the cost of electricity required to generate them. Cost doesn't equal value – hiring 1,000 men to shovel a big hole in the ground may be costly, but not valuable. Also, even though scarcity is a critical requirement for a useful currency, it alone doesn't make anything valuable. For example, your fingerprints are scarce, but that doesn't mean they have any exchange value."
Correct. The problem being the use of the word inherent to describe value. There is no such thing as inherent value unless you are describing a use and not the price someone would be willing to pay for something. For example, wood can be used to fuel a fire but that doesn't tell us anything about its' inherent value in exchange. That it has inherent value on these terms is obvious enough. For me it has almost none because I don't have a stove to safely burn it. Others feel differently.
You have to take a more general sort of view to things. To the median person making use of the value, how much are they getting out? How many people would find value?
For example not everyone likes shiny things but gold is also compact, protective, conducting, nonreacting, testable, etc.
Wood has a thousand and one uses but it's a bad currency because in addition to being bulky it's easy to make more wood. But in certain circumstances it would work fine.
There is barely any use people can get out of bags of sand, so it wouldn't work as a currency. Salt looks similar but used to be hard to get and is important to food and living, made a great currency.
Bitcoins by themselves don't have value. You could make a hundred knockoff block chains and they wouldn't do you any good. The bitcoin network as an entity that you can trust is where anything useful is actually derived from.
Just because some things have intrinsic value and have been used as a currency doesn't imply that something that doesn't have intrinsic value and is a currency can't be trusted.
You have to take a look at society's motivations, situation and psychological makeup, and from there you can make a prediction as to whether a currency can be trusted or not.
