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Here's one, people want to use bitcoin for transactions, as these blocks of transactions fill up, new hashes are needed for each block. The miners are finding these hashes and facilitating the continued use of the blockchain. I'm hazier on this one, but I believe transaction fees go to the finder of the hash? Anyway, wouldn't the value be is the protocol/platform itself, that's what people are buying in to, they want a usable, distributed ledger.

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I think what confuses me is that the distributed ledger is nice and all, but will never be faster or even necessarily more secure than a central one (yes yes, some trust in government regulation like the SEC is required but if we put our antiestablishment pitchforks aside and consider that random actors MAY be more malicious than the people that regulate the financial markets).

So what do you get? People trusting "centralized" front doors to something distributed. Like coinbase or any of the other exchanges. Now you have literally the worst of both worlds. Centralized but still slower and more expensive, + lack of regulation. I'm just not seeing it as ever being useful.

Yeah, I can't really answer that one for you, I don't own any coins and I don't really have a need to (apart from maybe needing to be rich if I had bought some 2 years ago). We're right back where we started, just because we don't find any value in it, doesn't mean other people also don't. Sure, the market might be inflated at the moment and over valued but there's gotta be some truth somewhere in it otherwise people wouldn't have been using it for the whole time coins were cheap.

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