You have to remember it's not really $ or currency - and only a tiny fraction of people believe it has value; most of them seem to be speculators and investors, or perhaps people being paid in the blockchain token who can liquidate as fast as they need USD or plan to hold onto it until the value goes up.

That they put '$' in front of amounts and include 'currency' in the word cryptocurrency is essentially a trick because society is habituated to the word currency and the $ sign as a signal of a currency - something as value in their mind; this misuse is similar to why you can't call yourself a chiropractor if you haven't gone through the training, people trust that title by default.

The fact they've adopted the $ sign and 'currency' is perhaps even fraud; they have monetary gain to look forward to from the result they're hoping/speculating for. And so far they seem to be successful in overlaying the concept of the dollar with these tokens and gaining traction with it.

The "$200 mil for a browser with no users" value is based solely on what the last people bought the tokens at - however it's not quickly liquid and I believe most of these popular blockchain token platforms have taken VC money - real USD - to give themselves a runway to survive. Essentially it's a trick to consumers for exactly where your confusion comes from; people in the ecosystem try to justify it by equating it to being like buying stock in a company but this is much more in reality, even if you can overlay that concept too.

If the finance people and media keep considering this real currency - they will continue to trick people until the point people actually believe it, and then there will be an unfair and unreasonable buying power shifted towards early adopters of Bitcoin or Ethereum's Ether et al; it acts very similar to a Ponzi scheme, where the first people in get their promised '20%' and it is the last people in the scheme that lose out, except with this blockchain token scheme it is much more subtle because of it being global, distributed/decentralized. This is another play by Big Finance to transfer a huge amount of wealth without the general population being able to realize it, and the only 'work' they're generally doing is pulling levers to get this ecosystem more and more adopted; because you found a way to transfer a lot of wealth (perhaps 40%+ of global wealth would shift to early adopters, I haven't seen projections - the earlier you adopt, the bigger piece of the pie you'd get which is in part why people want to start their own token) by creating a new global currency, and that reward isn't just IMHO.

From my current understanding it's a Ponzi-like scheme that's different in that it is global, decentralized, and mostly anonymous - which makes it much more dangerous. There are so many people in this global network that the value can drop, and there can be no return for a long period and it will survive because no one's knocking on your door - or there's no SEC to then investigate a like a Ponzi-scheme artist - especially because the issuer is the blockchain token itself, however everyone in the global ecosystem is working together to make others adopt it - so it's not as easy for the SEC as focusing on one individual.

The goal now with these blockchain tokens is for the holders to increase the use/adoption with the general public, wanting them to believe they have any value at all. They seem to be doing this by giving starting their own token, and giving away a bunch of it. In the case of Kik, they're giving away 10% which they equated to 1 trillion parts in what they're calling Kin - leaving them with 9 trillion more to play with - distribute for free or sell.

I do believe in the positive aspects of blockchain, however the current algorithms for distribution . Through some mechanism the value of a legitimate cryptocurrency ; not the mechanism that once enough people have adopted it that it will stabilize, at that point the wealth has already transferred to the early adopters - all because they stayed in the game to create a new currency and got other people to start playing. I am still hoping to find projections of how much wealth is and would actually be transferred depending on when a person adopted.