The United States government enforces, with lethal weapons, the right of Amazon shareholders to Amazon’s assets.

I guess their secondary use is offering them in support of a prospective acquisition (or dissolution) of Amazon, in exchange for which the acquirer or trustee would offer some other value at that time.

These events both seem very unlikely right now, but they provide a last-resort value for an ownership interest in Amazon.

(I don't mean to support other people in this thread who are criticizing cryptocurrencies for their lack of inherent value, but stocks do have a particular basis for their value that cryptocurrencies commonly don't.)

the value backing AMZN shares is the value of the utility that amazon, inc provides to society.

I agree, I was discussing the total market cap of all coin offerings in general as being around $500B which is just over half of the value of Apple.

I'd take ownership in Apple all day over any coin, as I suspect more people out there value the Apple Stock over the ever-increasingly tough to exchange Bitcoin.

Exactly. The value of the shares are tied directly to the output and monetary value of the company they are backing - and not hype and word-of-mouth.

there's definitely some hype and word of mouth involved in corporate valuations. but it's at least somewhat based in reality.

Yeah but if the world economy collapses so completely that the main value of gold is as a weapon to hit people with, your shares of Amazon will probably be about as useful as your Bitcoin wallet.