> The idea that an asset needs _no_ intrinsic value in order to be valuable, or that the intrinsic value may have been defined a long time ago and is now irrelevant to its current value just doesn't compute to me.

If you want to, you could argue that the energy spent in mining the coin is the intrinsic value.

Intrinsic value isn't as important in my opinion, what matters is what other people think and agree on.