Electricity and good internet cost money I think you need to incentivise people to secure the network and to process the data.
With the value of bitcoin coming from the proof of work and how secure the network is.
If you wanted to have a private block chain you wouldn't need to have a $ value but then it wouldn't be as good.
Think internet or intranet
I agree there need to be some payment for mining/witnessing
With NEM you get paid (not directly) for letting people securely host files, send messages etc.
https://gladius.io/ is quite an interesting ICO as it's aiming to pay people for sharing there bandwidth.
I don't like ICO's but the concept is nice.