It actually works a lot like gold. You even mine it in a similar way to gold: spend some regular currency for the mining equipment and cost of running the equipment, and hope you mine enough to make it worth it. (Sidenote: These days it's quite difficult to mine bitcoin at a rate that doesn't cost more in electricity than you make from mining)

When it comes time to buy things, there might be some merchants that directly accept bitcoin (or gold, in our analogy) as a currency, but most will require that you use official local currency, so you sell some of your gold/bitcoin and use normal currency to buy things.

So to answer your main question, it's not useful as a currency in most cases. There's an increasing number of online merchants that accept bitcoin but in very few brick-and-mortar stores.

It actually works a lot like gold. You even mine it in a similar way to gold: spend some regular currency for the mining equipment and cost of running the equipment, and hope you mine enough to make it worth it. (Sidenote: These days it's quite difficult to mine bitcoin at a rate that doesn't cost more in electricity than you make from mining)

When it comes time to buy things, there might be some merchants that directly accept bitcoin (or gold, in our analogy) as a currency, but most will require that you use official local currency, so you sell some of your gold/bitcoin and use normal currency to buy things.

So to answer your main question, it's not useful as a currency in most cases. There's an increasing number of online merchants that accept bitcoin but very few brick-and-mortar stores.