The latter has the potential of actually creating new wealth by doing a useful service to society, namely allowing cheap international payments without direct bank intervention. It is debatable how much that service will be worth (in concrete terms; say, how much more bread and wine the world will produce thanks to it). It coud be a lot --- but certainly a lot less than what Bitcoin salesmen claim.
Not merely International payments. Card swipe fees are a 3% tax on the GDP. Financialization has created some small efficiencies at a vast social and economic cost, which can be slowly removed through the deleveraging effects of counterparty-free cryptographic economy.
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Investing and speculating in bitcoins does not create any wealth.
That observation may be a bit facile. Liquidity is a huge boon, for example. Comparing bitcoin to equities is more likely to lead you astray than to guide you to a useful conclusion.
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Bitcoin trade is pure speculation, since none of the money that people spent buying bitcoins, from day zero, was loaned to the network to build its infrastructure or to pay his workers.
Where do you think the profits of the miners come from? From buyers of bitcoin. Speculators are among the major buyers of bitcoin. Indeed, until very recently, only speculators and drug users were meaningful purchasers. They paid for the network.
I am sure that you are making an intellectually honest effort to assess the facts and import of Bitcoin technology, but I get the impression that your political preconceptions are undermining those efforts in some ways, to some degree.
