But it seems like the primary use cases are speculation, criminal and terrorist funding schemes, tax evasion, and money laundering.
If I buy Apple stock, technically that's tied to a corporation named Apple that has assets and revenue (more or less, maybe less these days than you might assume). But bitcoins are just numbers, some more valuable than others.
But more to the point, hoarders were encouraging the use of bitcoin as a store of value, lying about their true use cases (speculation), hoping the big fish would start investing so the early people would cash out. It turned out to be one massive pump and dump scheme, but with cryptography, so that makes it okay.