A speculative store of value that everyone has coordinated upon is utility, and this has little to do with the quality of the underlying technology. The fact remains that I can pay merchants of varying degreees of shadiness in BTC much easier than I can send them a wire transfer. Now, you might not think this is good for the world, but it certainly is utility.
Because BTC is what they take. The coordination is more important than the tech. Granted, this is only because I don't patronize the super illegal Go To Jail Go Directly To Jail Do Not Pass Go type of merchants, but the point stands.
If you just need unfreezable funds and pseudonymity, not total cryptographically secured anonymity, you'll use Bitcoin instead of a dozen better methods (which are all crypto anyway, so wouldn't really count as a point against crypto, just BTC) because everyone else is using it.
So it's utility is for sketchy (but not too sketchy!) merchants in which a much cheaper wire transfer or free visa/mc payment would be unacceptable, but not illegal because it's a permanent public record of the transaction. Got it.
I mean, yes, they exist. And the public record is fine because you just create a new address for every transaction and cash out. Just because phone companies keep a record of who's calling who doesn't mean phones aren't useful for crime. You just use a burner phone in the full knowledge that the police can track you down, but won't because you're small fish doing minor crime.
To take one example, the global counterfeit brand market is worth trillions. They don't trade exclusively or even mainly in BTC (mostly you'd sell with physical cash), but they do use it for the reasons I mentioned above.
