As the proponents of the tulip bulb version of Bitcoin will tell you, most of the transactions today are speculative: people buying and selling Bitcoin in the hope that it will be worth more in the future. A more generous viewpoint would compare Bitcoin to gold, a scarce commodity that goes up and down in value and provides an alternative to national currencies.

Speculative transactions accounted for roughly 60 to 80 percent of all transactions on the blockchain, according to Chainalysis, a start-up that does analysis of the blockchain for big companies and governments. Most of those transactions are Bitcoins moving between cryptocurrency exchanges around the world.

There is still quite a bit of mystery about what accounts for the other 20 to 40 percent of the transactions. No one can force Bitcoin users to register their identity, so Chainalysis and other firms are in the dark about many transactions. But they have identified some useful chunks.

When Bitcoin was introduced in 2009, it was described as a new way to make payments online, without the fees that credit card companies charge. Chainalysis estimates that last year, companies handling Bitcoin payments accounted for 0.3 percent of all Bitcoin transactions, or $2.4 billion.

This is a healthy dose of apparently legal commerce, but it was not a good sign for Bitcoin that it was shrinking for most of last year when the price of Bitcoin was going down, according to Chainalysis data.

Many if not most Bitcoin advocates I’ve encountered will admit it doesn’t offer much of an improvement over traditional electronic methods of payment. In several ways, it’s worse. Paying with Bitcoin requires you to become a speculator on its volatile price for the time you are holding on to tokens and waiting to pay.