I'm going to try though I'm a neophyte myself. So if we take the example of oil, if you need to buy oil in 6 months time and don't want to be affected by market

I'm going to try though I'm a neophyte myself. So if we take the example of oil, if you need to buy oil in 6 months time and don't want to be affected by market volatility you can pay a small premium on today's prices to guarantee the price in the future. People that don't actually need oil but think that it will go up in value can also use the futures instead to bet on oil being more expensive and cash out the difference between what they paid and what the future price ends up being. Speculating on Bitcoin vs oil isn't so different, the only difference I can see is that where as there is use cases for hedging and one for speculating traditional futures there only exists the speculating use case for Bitcoin futures.