Do people "use" bitcoins? Right now it seems like something your betting on will eventually be useful.

Bitcoin holders don’t want Bitcoin to be useful for spending or transacting, or even selling. Previous attempts to increase the block size, a trivial modification, have failed to gain traction.

They only want Bitcoin useful for two things: Buying and holding. These actions drive the price up. As long as no one is using or selling Bitcoin, the price stays high.

Between the high transaction fees ($8 right now), the deflationary nature, and the “HODL” narrative, everything about Bitcoin was designed to disincentivize actually using it. It’s designed for hoarding and speculating.

This true for everyone who profited from pollution such as many oil tycoon/deforestation/etc, but they are not typically held in high regards.

Most people don't use Bitcoin, and most who use it (from what I see), just want to sell it at a higher price than they bought it. Only a minority of Bitcoin users use it for anything practical like payments.

The same could be argued for a Ponzi scheme: it is useful for the people at the top that have taken money from others, and not so useful for the people that have lost money by buying in later on.

The more interesting question is what value Bitcoin has created for society besides acting as a speculative good.

The people who hold btc consider the wealth made from it useful. BTC functions precisely as well as a payments system if the price is cut by 99%.