What's the case for Bitcoin's inherent utility? I could place some tulips around my flat and they would make me a little happier, for a little while - and that's what utility to humans ultimately boils down to.

The difference between Bitcoins and tulips is that someone can like tulips, and assign a value to a really cool tulip based on that. They can weigh the benefits of a tulip versus a rose or a painting of a tulip, and buy one based on whether it gives a good return of enjoyment for the price.

On top of that, you get tulip traders, who seek to buy tulips from people who value them less and sell them to people who value them more, and speculators who acquire and hold tulips on an expectation that they will be worth more in the future. From there the market can explode and the price can rise far beyond whatever the primary users of tulips are willing to pay.

The weird thing about Bitcoins is there is no floor to their value - their value as a unit of exchange or a store of value depends entirely on how many people are willing to accept them. A Bitcoin is not a tulip that some people want to simply admire or a corporation that has revenue or a parcel of land which has potential. With all those things, you might just want the thing for the thing. With Bitcoin, you only ever want it, either as a store of value or a medium of exchange, because other people also want it.

This is where everything becomes weird. With other markets, tulip or stock or real estate, you can speak of the commodity as being over-valued when speculation drives the price above what the people who want the thing itself are willing to pay. With Bitcoin, you cannot. You can't call Bitcoin overpriced or underpriced because it has no grounding, no price that is independent of demand.

Maybe you could point to various ways people try to abuse bitcoin blockchain as the utility. But then you still have to offset the disutility of wasting huge amounts of electricity.

They're edible and a common source of food in the Netherlands during world war 2.