I accept that maybe Ethereum could be valuable (I don't really understand smart contracts well enough to say..) and if they move to proof-of-stake that will make it more sustainable. Likewise, the sheer anonymity of something like Monero might be valuable for the black market.
But everything else just seems like people seeking a "greater fool" to sell to.
Imagine if my sql db was free but charged me $10 for any write transaction. That would suck. When the price gets to an operational level, people will use it.
I think the price it will eventually get to is Napster/BitTorrent-level.
I dump a ton of crap on blockchains and just set the transaction fee low until someone takes it
Also check out gas tokens as a concept, you can prebuy gas when gas prices are low and subsidize your future time sensitive transactions when gas prices are high
Try setting 1 cent as your transaction fee and see if anyone picks that up.
This works great if you already prebought way back when, but is not suitable for any current use case I can think of. And certainly not usable by many.
There’s not many situations where $10 for a few bytes is needed, even with the cool feature of free storage forever.
For comparison, 1GB is 2 cents per year on AWS deep glacier. And I trust AWS to be around in a hundred years more than ethereum. Not to mention that storing 1GB costs a fortune in transaction fees.