But cryptocurrencies have zero intrinsic value: If only one person owned all the $COIN and refused to part with any of it, the world wouldn’t accept its use, and would just create another currency with similar properties.

What you’ve neglected to mention is altcoins of every stripe can’t accomplish anything whatsoever — be it running “smart contracts”, acting as a medium of exchange, or securing the value of assets built on top of them — if no one is willing to speculatively hold them as a store of value first.

Touting themselves as the “oil” or the “internet” to Bitcoin’s gold is a rhetorical strategy employed by altcoin promoters to bootstrap speculative value storage on the networks they’re invested in. Without speculative value storage, they have nothing, the blockchain halts, and no one can use it for anything.

It’s all a total confidence game to its very core, without exception, and it irks me to no end when people egregiously misrepresent this reality, particularly for financially motivated reasons.

Case in point: “It’s not intended to be money. Most crypto currency’s aren’t.”