Yeah, i signed up for Kraken, but the damn verification process seems to be disabled. I wonder if it is only active certain hours of the day. I wanted to do ripple too long ago now.
As far as what drives up the value. It's scarcity. That's why it goes down in value every time a whale sells. Initially Bitcoin wasn't scarce, but now you need an impressive setup to mine it. People have bought condos with it. It's like buying a condo with rare magic cards. Gold has value because of scarcity. Aluminum for instance is quite common. If you google it comes up as $0.00 a pound. Gold is worth about $21,136 a pound. The most gold mined in history is only about 370,000,000 pounds or $7.8 trillion dollars. The US national debt is $19.8 trillion or 2.5 times the amount of gold ever mined in history.
If scarcity is the only driving value of bitcoin, then I definitely think this is a bubble that'll burst. Then you're basically talking about timing the market of when to sell.
Gold has value because it is scarce, but there are also practical applications for it. A government's currency has value basically because it's backed by that gov, which is also part of why with a stable gov, the value of the currency doesn't fluctuate all that much.
Cryptocurrency's a store of value that seems more akin to stocks in that there can be wide variances in value, except stocks in theory have an explicit purpose of letting people buy-into a company so that company can raise funds to either invest in their company or help pay off debts. Crypto's (and namely, bitcoin) demand seems to stem solely from a notion that they want a method to make transactions without a government store of value or a current financial institution.
Maybe that's enough for some, and enough that cryptocurrency will retain an amount of value over time. I'm still considering this more as a pet project/curiosity rather than a legitimate way to grow personal wealth, but what harm does it do to have your computer mine some coin if it's basically on all day, anyway?