I am so lost in all of this.
At the root of it all its very simple.
Money has always been an abstraction from tangible goods, an has always been nothing more than a social contract.
What is unique about "cryptocurrencies" is that they are created by people and not governments created purely from a shared electronic ledger known as a blockchain.
However, as with any money, it is only as good as the trust given by society who uses it, and as a software developer my self, I can foresee a total collapse once an inevitable flaw is found in the software used to guarantee the integrity of a "blockchain".