What gives a Crytocurrency its Value

What gives a Crytocurrency its Value
What is money? Money has been in and of itself. Historically, a shell, a metal coin, or a piece of paper with a historic image on it, but the value that people place on it has nothing to do with the physical value of the money. Money derives its value by being a medium of exchange, a unit of measurement and a storehouse for wealth. Money allows people to trade goods and services indirectly, understand the price of goods (prices written in dollar and cents correspond with an amount in your wallet) and gives us a way to save for larger purchases in the future.
Money is valuable merely because everyone knows everyone else will accept it as a form of payment.
let's take a look at where it has been, how it evolved and how it is used today.

Batering
Bartering is a direct trade of goods and services – I will give you a stone axe if you help me kill a mammoth but such arrangements take time. You have to find someone who thinks an axe is a fair trade for having to face the 12-foot tusks on a beast that doesn't take kindly to being hunted. If that didn't work, you would have to alter the deal until someone agreed to the terms. One of the great achievements of money was increasing the speed at which business, whether mammoth slaying or monument building, could be done.

Slowly, a type of prehistoric currency involving easily traded goods like animal skins, salt and weapons developed over the centuries. These traded goods served as the medium of exchange even though the unit values were still negotiable. This system of barter and trade spread across the world, and it still survives today on some parts of the globe.
Coins and Currency
This is a physical mining of precious metals which metal into coins, the first coins were made from electrum, a mixture of silver and gold that occurs naturally, and stamped with pictures that acted as denominations.

Paper currency
The first paper currency issued by European governments was actually issued by colonial governments in North America. Because shipments between Europe and the colonies took so long, the colonists often ran out of cash as operations expanded. Instead of going back to a barter system, the colonial governments used IOUs that traded as a currency. The first instance was in Canada, then a French colony. In 1685, soldiers were issued playing cards denominated and signed by the governor to use as cash instead of coins from France.
Money Travels
The shift to paper money in Europe increased the amount of international trade that could occur. Banks and the ruling classes started buying currencies from other nations and created the first currency market. The stability of a particular monarchy or government affected the value of the country's currency and the ability for that country to trade on an increasingly international market. The competition between countries often led to currency wars, where competing countries would try to affect the value of the competitor's currency by driving it up and making the enemy's goods too expensive, by driving it down and reducing the enemy's buying power (and ability to pay for a war), or by eliminating the currency completely.

Mobile Payments
The 21st century gave rise to two disruptive forms of currency: Mobile payments and virtual currency. A mobile payment is money rendered for a product or service through a portable electronic device such as a cell phone, smartphone or PDA. Mobile payment technology can also be used to send money to friends or family members. Increasingly, services like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay are vying for retailers to accept their platforms for point-of-sale payments.

Virtual Currency
Bitcoin, invented in 2009 by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, became the gold standard--so to speak--for virtual currencies. Virtual currencies have no physical coinage. The appeal of virtual currency is it offers the promise of lower transaction fees than traditional online payment mechanisms and is operated by a decentralized authority, unlike government issued currencies.

But what gives bitcoin its value

The value comes from their scarcity. To use something as a medium of exchange, it only has to have a certain set of properties. Bitcoins have these properties, so they can be used as a medium of exchange.

They are fungible. That is, 10 bitcoins is 10 bitcoins. This makes Bitcoins more useful as a medium of exchange than, say, apples, which vary widely in quality, size, and so on.

They are scarce. The number of bitcoins is predictable over time.

They are easily transferred. They are not easily counterfeited.

That's pretty much all you need. Nothing needs to back them just like nothing backs gold. The primary purpose of a backing is to ensure scarcity. But the block generation algorithm does that for Bitcoins.