What makes a coin valuable?

[I am the guy]

what makes a coin valuable?.

It's inherent or perceived utility. It's a mix combination of speculation and first/early adoption holders/supporters.        

[JosNekoKopa]

99.9% of the altcoins (except the ones, which are already well established) are pretty much useless.
You must understand that technology is already out there, and we should focus on adoption, instead of adding few gimmicks here and there.
I can give you an example with the so called "anonymous coins", which promise you to keep your privacy.
Come on, do you think that any serious business could accept them as a way of payment?

Yes they can be accepted very good on darknet same as bitcoin was. Serious or not it is precious for some business  ..Also if we look from standpoint of human rights , they are needed but people neglecting basic freedoms..

[d5000]

That's a highly philosophical question without a clear answer. Speculation, "scarcity", community ... all of that are components of value. But how they exactly work is unclear. If we had a clear answer, someone would have already created a perfectly stable coin.

My approach is the following:
- Basically all people using a cryptocoin form a community.
- Each community member decides if he wants to contribute something to this community. The simplest form is money - when you simply "buy" coins. Other contributions can be network security (mining), development, marketing, etc..
- If you make a sum of the contributions of all members, you have a base value of the cryptocurrency. (There were websites that did try to do this, but I don't know if they still exist.)

Now this base value must not be equal to the coin price, as already was pointed out. The main influence are future expectations.

That are questions like: Is there a chance for the coin to succeed? Does it have unique selling propositions which could drive forward adoption or are there dangerous competitors with clear advantages? Is interest actually growing or dwindling? Are there conflicts in the community that could affect success? (That later was probably the reason for the Bitcoin bear market of the last 3-4 months which has finished some days ago)

Future expectations can be short-term, mid-term and long-term oriented. While short-term expectations are mostly based on price (as the simplest metric, using technical analysys), for a long term outlook you should check development of all pillars of the cryptocurrency, involving features, development team, marketing, and commerce/service adoption.

[PALEY]

Having considered most of our discussions here.
Palcoin have been conceived and it shall be launched on the 7th of May 2016.
Here is the pre ann thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1462217.new#new
I promise to implement and maintain most of the things we discussed.
Thank you.