It's a distributed ledger that is verified via proof-of-work. People have decided to assign it speculative value, largely as a sort of fin-tech smart-banking pitch. Ultimately though, there just aren't many non-financial usecases for a _public_ distributed ledger. Simply verifying transactions doesn't solve much - you need to vet the _nature_ of the transaction to make sure that screwy things aren't happening using _other_ stores of value (not bound by the laws of proof-of-work). Centralization will appear to "solve" these problems, just as it does with USD.

That's why I feel that bitcoin is always going to be ripe for abuse and highly adjacent to scams, even if the original paper is impressive and an interesting result.