How do you value oil or refined fuels? Same thing, no? At least with regards to Eth and Sol, they are commodities that presently have value because in the future people will need to purchase them to conduct the work that they want to perform.
You can value oil by the value things that can be made with it against the cost to extract it.
Crypto does have an "extraction" cost, so that provides a baseline, but there's no downstream product to provide that value.
Crypto holders speculate that in the future they'll need crypto, but that isn't a given.
Not true. Ethereum and Solana, for example, provide shared-data and shared-compute services. Eth and Sol are used to pay for these services (and are the only means to pay for these services).
You may not value these services, but there are plenty of people who do, to the tune of anywhere from $10 to even hundreds of dollars per transaction, in the case of Ethereum.
I won't argue you can't buy goods and services with crypto. You certainly can't produce plastic without oil, but there's nothing that can be made with crypto. It's not a commodity. That's why it's a speculative asset that's hard to value. Sentiment means more to crypto values than downstream values.
In this particular example, if a competitor offered data sharing and shared compute services 100x cheaper than the eth network, I don't think eth value would go down anything close to 100x. If I found a way to turn air into plastic and gas, you can bet oil prices would plunge. If Musk said crypto is dead, prices would plummet.
In this way, native crypto tokens like Eth are similar to petroleum, in that their value is commensurate with the value of the work that can be performed by consuming them.
Sure, competition between networks can have an impact on price, just like competition from electric vehicles can impact the price of oil. But competition does not itself destroy value, even if it has an impact on demand, and therefore on price.
The article itself talks about the difference between value and price. The price of crypto might be inflated by the hype surrounding it, but that does not mean that is has no underlying value, as you seem to assert.
The shared compute I saw was Golem, which is pretty neat actually. Not sure how you join the network without either sharing compute or buying into ETH with a traditional currency, bringing us back to square 1.
But as a speculative asset crypto is great! Many a mansion and Corvette have been bought with crypto gains while I'm on the sidelines wondering what the hell is going on, every yesterday being a great time to buy and every today seeming like tomorrow's the day I'd be left holding the bag.