Yes, a big part is speculation but how could it not be? Any bet on the future is speculation. Apologies if your argument is actually more subtle, in which case I'd like to hear it.
This is not true. Speculation is specifically referring to the situation where you are betting specifically because you think the bet you made will result in positive financial return.
Just go through github, whitepapers and technical discussions to see the serious side of the industry, rather than being stuck to the surface level of fraudsters/speculators promising 100x money returns on social media.
Although there are some cases under oppressive regimes where black markets may be a moral good, on the whole enabling financial crimes is, in my value system, bad.
Furthermore I think regulatory systems will eventually move against this - in fact you see it starting. See https://doomberg.substack.com/p/a-stablecoin-applies-to-beco...
Why is this different?
One part of it is:
As both a matter of norms and law, we expect and desire more public scrutiny of financial transactions than of speech. In particular, various taxes mean that a large fraction of financial transactions cannot and should not be private. Conversely the great majority of 1 on 1 conversations raise no legal or regulatory issues.
But it is working! Bitcoin has hundreds of thousands of transactions per day on the main chain alone where it settles 2B+$ in value, eth has tons of really useful defi projects that people actually use (maker, compound, aave, uniswap, etc).