It is valuable because it is a shared public data store with equal access read and write privileges. Data stored in it is available, partitionable and eventually consistent. It works due to the economic incentives of being rewarded for validating transactions.
Prior to Bitcoin there were no shared public data stores that satisfied these requirements. Bittorrent and Freenet are not guaranteed to have data availability. That is, you can't always get what you stored. DHTs only work when they are centralized and are susceptible to a number of different attacks when operated with general public access.
The only way to interact with this data store is by being in control of Bitcoin. That is what gives value to the units of account.
I understand what you're saying. The only problem is what data is in that decentralized, available, secure data store. The only data allowed in is self-referencing data. Most people don't care about the Bitcoin data store. If I could access, say, Gutenberg.org books in that data store, or something of that nature, I and others would find more value in it.
On the other end of that, processing, not data, there are distributed processing projects out there finding the optimal golomb rulers, looking for pulsars, how protein folds etc. There could be value in a distributed project processing these and other projects. All of Bitcoin processing is self-referential though, it does not allow for this potentially more valuable processing.
What you're describing would be valuable, but not if the only data storable is self-referencing. People don't buy 1 terabyte disk drives that already store Bitcoin blockchain history. They pay for hard drives because they will store the information they want to store and retrieve on them.
I personally believe that there is intrinsic value in just the self-referential nature of Bitcoin transactions but what's important to realize is that the transactional nature of Bitcoin is what allows for the entire system to work, regardless of what is built on top of it.
A basic transaction of "A sent X to Y" might not be as valuable as a poem, but it still has some level of value.
If digital currencies focused more on this type of thing, they might actually stay around for a while longer. This is something I can see the value and usefulness of. A Bitcoin competitor focused around things like this, and perhaps allowing people to pay for non-blockchain mass processing power, might actually be viable in the long term. Because it would be actually useful and valuable.
>If digital currencies focused more on this type of thing, they might actually stay around for a while longer. This is something I can see the value and usefulness of.
There's about as much point in having a competitor to Bitcoin as there is in have a competitor to the World Wide Web.
There is an incredible amount of infrastructure built up around Bitcoin. There are currency exchanges all over the world. There are thousands of software libraries and applications. These network effects are very real.
The only way to build the types of extensions that you deem valuable are on top of the existing primitive infrastructure.
It's a shame that there is so much political rhetoric clouding the the real value. It kept me from discovering this stuff for the longest time!
Prior to Bitcoin there were no shared public data stores that satisfied these requirements. Bittorrent and Freenet are not guaranteed to have data availability. That is, you can't always get what you stored. DHTs only work when they are centralized and are susceptible to a number of different attacks when operated with general public access.
The only way to interact with this data store is by being in control of Bitcoin. That is what gives value to the units of account.