None of it (including Bitcoin) generates any value. Nothing is created that benefits the human race. It's speculation all the way down - the only value that a bitcoin has is the likelihood of someone else paying more for it than you paid for it. It's not a turning point for human civilisation; it's a slot machine in a digital casino.
Not that the derivatives of "tradfi" are any better. But underneath all that speculation at least there is actual stocks in actual companies that are actually making real human value.
The distinction between cash and crypto boils down to if you have more trust in centralization or de-centralization.
With Bitcoin, we're talking about nothing less than the separation of money and state, like we obtained the separation of church and state. This is huge.
How is that better?
We're also rolling the Stratum v2 protocol, which will considerably improve the decentralization.
https://braiins.com/blog/stratum-v2-bitcoin-decentralization
You could say gold, silver or basically any store of value use PoW too: they require a considerable amount of time and energy to obtain. If you could just use dirt as money, it would be worthless as anyone could produce some effortlessly. It's the basis of sound money.
Bitcoin currently uses about 85TW/year of energy for its mining. Estimations for the traditional finance system seem to be around 2000TW/year. Factoring the amount of transactions, Bitcoin is about 50 more efficient per transaction (accounting transportation, paper and coin production, datacenters, energy used by banks). Its energy usage is also independent of the amount of transactions, so it becomes more efficient as the number of transactions grow.
It cannot function as a currency because it's too slow (you can't wait for ~10 minutes to see if your transaction for included in the block in order to pay for a coffee).
In order to separate State from Money, we need a currency. Until I can buy a coffee with my hypothetical FreeCoin, I need to rely on fiat currency supplied by someone both I and the barista trust (like a government).
This isn't huge, it's shit
Large amounts of transactions should be made off-chain through payment channels, with only the final balance between the parties written to the blockchain. This what layers 2, sitting above the blockchain, are about.
Common layers 2 are Lightning and Liquid, the former being the most widely used.
https://www.bitcoin.com/get-started/what-is-lightning-networ...
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lightning-network.asp
It might interest you to note than clightning is written by Rusty Russel, mostly know for its work with the Linux kernel, and also author of iptables.
We're also seing some layer 3 like RGB for smart contracts, but I digress. Suffice to say, Bitcoin is more than its layer 1 and store of value.
The rest will at best be iterative technology that may eventually be integrated into the traditional securities and exchange systems governed by the local monopoly on violence, but is generally uninvestable in its current form.