There is over $34 billion settled on the Visa payment network every day (averaged over 12 months), and nearly 100% of this is merchant transactions for actual things and services.
Also I just checked the median transaction amount on Bitcoin and it's something about $200. So it's reasonable to assume that at least half of all transactions are actual purchases of things and services.
(I agree though, that was impressive mental gymnastics.)
No it isn’t.
https://finance.yahoo.com/u/yahoo-finance/watchlists/crypto-...