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Bitcoin is the world’s first truly scarce digital asset. It was created by an anonymous developer who went by the name Satoshi Nakamoto. On October 31st, 2008, Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper to a cryptography mailing list, where he described Bitcoin as a “peer to peer electronic cash system.”

So why is that important?

1. Money is, at the end of the day, a physical object. To digitize money and send it over the internet, you must introduce a third party that has the infrastructure to do so. In the modern era, this requires a system of banks and other intermediaries.
2. Digital representations of money run into the “double spending problem,” where an individual can manipulate the digital code to spend the same dollar more than once. This problem requires a trusted third party that can verify that each dollar being spent has not already been spent.      

Bitcoin was invented to solve both problems without any need for that “trusted” third party. You can think of it as a two-in-one type of package that consists of a monetary unit and a network that exists to securely transport that monetary unit. In essence, the main goal is to make each online transaction equal to exchanging physical cash between two people. This is why Satoshi described it as an electronic cash system that was, “peer to peer.” Because, when you spend Bitcoin, you are sending it directly to the individual from whom you are purchasing something, without any need for a bank or some other third party to get involved. It’s almost as if you are handing them cash directly. This is possible due to the decentralized  nature of the Bitcoin network, which ensures that no single entity controls it.