After the economic collapse about a year 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto created a new currency that suppose to be a medium of exchange without the Government, banks and any other third party involved in transactions, in other words it's peer to peer transfer of value via decentralized blockchain. Before, it was easy and cheap to transfer bitcoin to other person, but today it's a bit harder, longer, and expensive due to it's scalability and scarcity supply of bitcoin(21m) that leads from a crypto currency to sort kind of commodity that will exist forever unless you turned off all the Internet around the world, and that's why there's a value to it at the same time it serves as a hedge against incoming economic collapse.