On the other hand... the existing financial industry - even just the bits around creating and storing currency, and handling transactions - is rather a massive waste too. If it's possible to replace that with something that (a) gives more power to the people and (b) requires fewer people to run, that's probably a good thing - no comment on whether Bitcoin is that something.

I have no problem with saying that traditional money and cryptocurrency has no intrinsic value, but mostly because I think the concept of "intrinsic value" is rather useless.