I work for a bank. Applying your analysis, one could argue that banks offer zero intrinsic value. After all, all they allow you to do is to move money around back and forth between different people.
But, as it turns out, moving money back and forth between different people is a very valuable service. Let me be clear: there are many activities practiced by banks that add very little value to the world. For example, one could argue that high frequency trading (beyond the point needed to provide market liquidity) adds very little value.
But banks allow people to exchange goods and services without having to barter. Banks allow people to store wealth and transport wealth and exchange both with other people without having to move around carts laden with gold and higher huge numbers of guards to keep it safe. Banks help to match together people who have capital ("investors", "savers") with people who could accomplish things if only they had capital ("borrowers","entrepreneurs") and facilitates them working together through interest payments.
Just as banks are far from useless (although some of the things they do add little value to humanity), so cryptocurrencies *MAY* be far from useless (although I agree the majority of people involved at this point are doing little more than engaging in a broad Ponzi scheme).
What I meant was that it's the bank shares that capture the value you describe, not dollars. And because the bank does create the value you describe, the shareholders of that bank are rewarded by and increase in shareholder equity value.
There's no reason for the intrinsic value of dollars to go up because banks exist beyond their value increase attributable to a growth in GDP as a result.
The role you describe here maps to miners, which are in fact the third party that in aggregate facilitates bitcoin transactions. They are rewarded via block rewards for this service which similarly increases their shareholder equity. Bitcoin doesn't enable people to move bitcoins between wallets, miners do. Bitcoin basically unbundles the services banks provide, but it doesn't internalize them or capture the value they create.
It's funny how low inflation or even deflation (if you consider 2% to be price stability) caused a rush of money into mortgage bonds and subsequently destabilized fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies try to beat fiat currencies on their way to becoming useless as a medium of exchange and subsequently make it useless for financing via debt.
You have too much faith in financial literacy of the participants in this market. [1] It doesn't really matter as much as you may think because they (1) are using these casino tokens to borrow more tokens to buy yet more tokens and (2) they see liquidations as a natural part of such lending.
[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/are-we-dumb-financial-illiter...
With a business where you hold shares, the business generates cash flow. That cash flow is invested in the business, in share re-purchases and in dividends. This cashflow increases the intrinsic value of each share of the business. The expectation is that holders of equity will be rewarded through the future performance of the business.
Those early folks are rewarded by people who derive value from the system - the customers of the business, whoever they are. They're rewarded for building a business not shilling their equity. The equity value is a consequence of the business being built.
On the other hand the sole source of gains from crypto come from future buyers. Worse, miners, especially on PoW chains, have to be paid and so constantly extract huge quantities of welfare from the system. With Bitcoin, it's something like 20-30 million dollars per day. That gets turned almost directly into CO2 and e-waste. 67MT of CO2 and 6.5kT on e-waste per year.
Early holders are simply rewarded for shilling, hoping someone else will grab their coins for a higher price. It's just an MLM scheme which yields zero intrinsic value.
Ergo, bitcoin is strongly negative sum while equities are positive sum vehicles.
The thing is, most people don't understand the economics or the fundamentals. Those who do get it (especially bankers, ex-wallstreet folks) intentionally downplay it rather than educating folks because they know their paycheck depends on people not understanding. The community pretends or fails to understand and looks the other way. They're all convinced they're "getting in early, on the ground floor of the future of money" - classic MLM stuff.
They're really only superficially similar, in the sense they're traded on brokerage-like services.