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Bitcoin was created in the shadows and by being the first and its being reasonably secure in design has caught the eye of the fiancial system. It was inspired by John Nash who was featured in the film A Beautiful mind. Dr Nash was autistic and a genious who developed skitzophrenia, but during his career in Economics at Princeton he conceived of many of the underpinnings of the derivatives market. Devitives are financial products based or derived from other economic products. Futures for physical goods like oil, foodstuffs and now surrogates for the financial markets themselves. Famous derivatives include stock indexes and benchmarks like regional oil prices. He figured out how to optimally price options on stocks and these futures. He also conceived of the the Nash Equilibrium about how markets come to set a price. Later in life he started to theorize the concept of Ideal Money and did some other work with cryptographay. Bitcoin rather than simply carry some other stuff like our internet traffic or data itself, is setup to be like money while also selfcontaining a ledger of all transactions. This for bitcoin is called the blockchain where everything is listed. It is only pseudo-anonymous not truely private, and this has led to bad outcome for some of the lucky early adoptors, who nievely bragged about their source of "wealth". People have been kidnapped and forced to give up control of their loot. So as usual the ones with sufficient resources to hold these modern chests of gold to have armed security often corporations are becoming dominant or intermediatories sort of like brokerage houses, which have much less consumer protections.

So it is a glorified ponzi scheme wrapped inside of some neat novel ideas. A point of failure is that any cartel who's total holdings break over 50% can wreck the system. Bitcoin is basically montizing energy usage, along capital invested in computational capacity, so it is a drag on our environment, as long as we mostly make energy using fossil fuels.