If the actual money people paid was destroyed/transferred into Bitcoin instead of just transferred to whomever you bought it from, then the value would be real - but it's not.
The distinction between artificial and natural i.e. intrinsic value is completely arbitrary if you think it through. Where do you think comes the value of dollar bills from?
Of course, why things have value originates in their utility. But everybody has a different idea of utility. You don’t think Bitcoin is useful but others have a different value. That’s why they are investing despite the risk. Since Bitcoin’s market cap is nearing the $1T mark quite a lot of people seem to agree in its utility...
BTW: You might want to google “subjective theory of value” and “regression theorem” to get a better understanding of what’s going on. Spoiler alert: The concepts are fundamental to economic theory and have nothing to do with Cryptos.
"Since Bitcoin’s market cap is nearing the $1T mark quite a lot of people seem to agree in its utility..."
Speculation/gambling as primarily utility, sure. But there are better models that can compete on price and without the unavoidable pitfalls of Bitcoin that are too dangerous to society to have - and I'm not even going to bother to list a main example which gets ignored/unresponded to 100% of the time I ask.
> 37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1.