It's used every day in some legitimate ways. For example, Premise Data Corporation pays their data collectors in almost entirely bitcoin. https://medium.com/@premisedata/premise-payouts-get-easier-w...

> or are people gambling on the value of it?

Welcome to investing. Adoption is success.

Does a skyrocketing penny stock imply a successful company?

A penny stock that skyrockets and holds value is no longer a penny stock. Bitcoin is 8 years old and has hit $1000 USD twice now over multiple years.

The "market cap" is currently over 16 billion dollars. It would place 68th when compared with 192 countries M1 money supply (2015) data: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

The hash rate securing the network is currently at 2.5 quintillion operations per second which is really 5 quintillion SHA256 operations every second: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ Speaking of pennies... if every operation was a penny laid flat on earth, you could cover the surface of the earth, land and sea, twice over every second.

Bitcoin surpassed the penny stock phase a long time ago.

If it stays 'skyrocketed', yes.

Is this a currency or just a (totally speculative) stock then?

It's Forex which is both.

How would you decide that?

Both although it's hard to tell how much is success and how much is speculation.

Bitcoin's dirty little secret: Illegal drugs/services.

If you can't buy drugs with it then I'd argue it isn't money. In Baltimore you can trade a bottle of name brand laundry detergent for drugs. I guess that is a clean secret though.

It's hardly a secret. It was designed to be a tool for circumventing states' financial control. Illicit transactions are an obvious application.

My belief is that after the crashes, few weak hands remain. Brexit's speculation bubble was extremely tame and corrected back to modest growth after only days. Only in the last couple weeks has the growth looked particularly bubbley. Fully unqualified speculation from a casual investor: I suspect the correction goes to no lower than $800.