How do Bitcoins have a real world value?

As Bitcoins continue to be mined they begin to create more value since more and more people begin to own them. You can kind of think of them as trading cards or beanie babies. The longer you hold onto these things the more value they tend to take on as more and more people begin collecting them. The biggest difference is you can’t take your Babe Ruth rookie card to the car dealership and trade it for a car because it’s not a universal means of exchange like Bitcoins or a credit card. You have to go through the painstaking process of finding a buyer and turning that card into money. Bitcoin itself has consolidated that process.
People worked hard for months or years to mine these things, investing time, hardware, and energy in the process. This is where the initial value of the currency is born, since time and money was used to create them.

Put yourself in the shoes of a miner: you invest time, money and brainpower into mining these coins against thousands of other people around the planet. You’re not just going to give them all away for free. Everyone wants to get their money back from an investment, so people started exchanging Bitcoin for different things including currencies like the US dollar and the Euro. In return this allowed new people outside of the mining ring to collect and exchange Bitcoin, thus the currency began to grow which started to create a networking effect.

Now normal everyday people are exchanging cash for Bitcoins, wondering what the hell can I do with these things?