The investment banker Jamie Dimon caused a stir when he declared recently that Bitcoin will collapse because it is "worth nothing." Bitcoin's current market value, he claimed, is driven almost entirely by speculation, rather than by any real and present intrinsic value that Bitcoin actually provides.
Casting aside the debate over whether Bitcoin has intrinsic value or not, it seems fair to say that Dimon doesn't know the cryptocurrency market well. If he did, he might have noted that Bitcoin is only one of dozens of major tokens available. Some tokens were designed with intrinsic value as a specific goal.
Background
Particl, which was created last spring , is building a decentralized eCommerce platform, a framework for third party apps, and a suite of privacy tools to go with it.
PART solves various privacy problems associated with BTC, such as the ability of third parties to trace transactions. Adding multiple cryptographic proofs like Ring Signature Confidential Transactions (RingCT) and Confidential Transaction (CT) plus trustless mechanisms like MAD escrow, Particl provides 100 percent anonymity to people who buy and sell using PART.
While the Particl privacy platform and upcoming Marketplace supports most major cryptocurrencies, PART serves as its utility token.
PART and Intrinsic Value
The value of Bitcoin has risen astronomically over the past several years in part because people believe Bitcoin will one day be widely used and provide services that other forms of currency cannot. For this reason, the growth in value of Bitcoin has far outpaced actual Bitcoin adoption.
PART is different. PART's value is based on more than the potential future worth of the Particl Platform or PART tokens. People who own PART tokens derive immediate benefits from them, including the following.
Token Flexibility
PART is a flexible cryptocurrency, especially with respect to the level of privacy and anonymity users wish to have.
Voting Rights
PART ownership confers voting rights within the PART community. The future development of the Particl Project and its privacy platform is decided by users who own PART tokens. In this sense, PART tokens have an intrinsic value that is absent from a cryptocurrency like bitcoin, where the ability to propose or vote on platform changes is not linked to coin ownership.
Passive Income
PART tokens generate passive income for their owners through working for the network (staking) and from fees collected from privacy DApps built on the platform like the upcoming Marketplace. PART is an inflationary token, therefore its supply increases by 5 percent in the first year and decreases by one percentage point until the fourth year, when the inflation rate reaches 2 percent. Inflation is then maintained at a 2 percent rate indefinitely.
Utility Coin
Default transactions on the Particl network are pseudo-anonymous like Bitcoin. The network is Proof of Stake (PoS) so only default and stealth addresses can stake PART. Exchanges and services also transact with the network using public PART addresses.
Read more here: http://www.nasdaq.com/article/creating-intrinsic-value-in-cryptocurrencies-cm853340