I'm hoping that some of this massive speculation and hype will drive general acceptance of crypto from online vendors, and some of the associated infrastructure required to make that work.
I bought some bitcoin before the crash from ~$700 CAD to ~$200 CAD, and well before the current insane exponential climb, with the intention of trying to use it, and not for speculation. Using it turned out to be hard, and eventually, I stopped trying and forgot about it for a while.

Now that there's some real perceived market value in the bitcoin I'd purchase, I went looking for ways to spend some of it. I thought it would be reasonable to attempt to spend what the total amount I spent in CAD.

Well, spending bitcoin is still difficult, and it was challenging to recoup my initial purchase amount.

I've found some companies that claimed they accepted bitcoin, but if you try, you'll find that there are country restrictions, or that you are reading old articles, and this is no longer the case. Newegg was one such company, and there was no way to spend bitcoin at newegg in Canada.

I found that overstock.com accepts bitcoin, but their prices are all inflated. If they there are price savings as a result of their purchase of overstock items, not much of that is being passed on to the customer. They also use coinbase as their backend engine for accepting bitcoin, and coinbase doesn't handle slow confirmations well. Since all confirmations are slow these days with all the rampant bitcoin speculation, this is a significant issue. Dealing with a coinbase to overstock payment that went to limbo because of transaction timeout was not fun, and overstock support left a lot to be desired. When I did finally make a purchase successfully, they sent me the wrong item (a locked phone when I had ordered an unlocked one). I did keep the bench grinder I ordered from overstock, but don't expect to make any other purchases there.

There are a number of blogs and podcast producers that will take bitcoin, and I've donated successfully to a few of those. Recently, even that has become difficult due to high fees and network delays. For example, I donated $150 USD equivalent to the Scott Horton show (an antiwar podcaster with phenomenal knowledge and a massive archive of informative but depressing interviews). The bitcoin equivalent of $150 USD is chump change right now with all the bitcoin speculation. My wallet software was slightly out of date, and didn't set a high enough fee for the transaction to successfully get processed. I had to upgrade my wallet software, and use a parent pays secondary transaction to get it out of limbo. I believe the total effective fees that I had to pay for this added up to $36 USD, all to attempt to donate $150 (not entirely a donation, since I got a signed copy of Hortan's new book.)

There are vendors like coincards.ca that will accept bitcoin for gift cards. I've successfully used them, despite their massive "convenience" fees to cash. I get the sense that they are a fairly small scale operation, and the combination of the Christmas season and the current speculation has caused them to shut down all orders, so they can process existing ones. Orders on that site have been down for at least a week now, all at Christmas time, which must have cost them massively.
When the site was up, I attempted to use their alt-coin payment method to circumvent the slow network issues and high fees. This did not work since the conversion went through shapeshift.io which converted the alt-coin to bitcoin (as opposed to a national currency), and the network delay was still imposed in the end.

In the end I was able to spend 2x my initial purchase amount, but I had to pay a lot in fees to do so. In the 2-3 years since I bought the little bit of bitcoin that I have, it is now less useable than when I bought it, and certainly doesn't live up to the initial claims that it was something that could be used for cheap micro transactions.