yes, much like the stock market
Do people speculate on it more than they probably should? Sure. But at the heart of the stock market is a system of "I just sold a physical thing for $1000, and since you own the stock you get $0.00001 of that". At the heart of crypto is "my computer did some math, so... money".
Just like in the equities market, speculation and gambling dominates market values of these things to varying degrees (to a comical extent in growth tech recently, for example).
But where's the value being delivered by that "decentralized banking infrastructure and currency"? Actual usefulness of crypto for genuinely decentralised (i.e. L1) transactions has been going down not up (fees are higher than ever, fewer and fewer stores allow direct payment with cryptocurrency...).
It happens every day....
If you say, "Selling cryptocoins to others", that isn't actually a product or service.
Oracle (READ: aggregated/decentralized APIs feed) services and other infrastructure that supports decentralized protocols (network graph, etc.)
Decentralized lending, borrowing, trading.
SaaS products in on-chain analytics, portfolio management, commerce aggreggation.
Gaming
Fine Art (a tiny minority of the art scene in crypto is pretty interesting, ex. distributed multiplayer run-time art, something that can't really exist outside of the medium)
Digital Collectibles as an end consumer product or in service of the construction of lifestyle brand / gaming / etc startups. (A lot of the most boring use cases land here, imo)
Advertising
Content creation/consumption
There's a tiny sliver of cases where crypto brings real value by enabling something that you couldn't do without it (e.g. cryptokitties was genuinely novel and interesting). But it's just such a vanishingly small proportion of the ecosystem.
When I take a loan from a bank, I may use it for education, a vacation, medical emergency, a car or invest in a business which will generate revenue and employment.
What do people do with tokens they borrow in "DeFi"? Given that the tokens can't be used for paying college tuition or a hospital bills or rent or buying a machine?
Ownership of bitcoins doesn’t give you ownership over these entities the same as ownership over some shares of Apple.
It’s like saying that you having dollars in your pocket gives you ownership over the White House.
Regarding ownership, however, you can explicitly own things- or parts of things- on the basis of token ownership, but you’re right that this isn’t the way that bitcoin and many other technologies are structured.
And only bad ones from crypto.
Even if a company is loss making and doesn't pay dividend, there will be someone who would be interested in acquiring the company to actually run it and not just just to flip it to a bigger buyer at a later date. That is why Musk paid $44B for Twitter. Because after all is said and done, it is still the most influential social network amongst the people who matter. Owning it has a value for someone like Musk. That value comes from the activity that Twitter conducts and not the demand for its shares.
In crypto value comes only from the demand. In stock, demand comes from the value being generated by the company.
This is not entirely accurate. The "crypto" industry is not a monolithic piece of technology or implementation. Some tokens provide governance, which is a proxy for legal ownership. Some tokens provide ownership directly or contain trustless, immutable access to assets.
I personally find decentralized programmable networks like ethereum- where it's sort of choose your own adventure in regard to utility, ownership, implementation, et cetera- to be more interesting than bitcoin.
Companies like Coinbase are selling turtles all the way down, then.