What is Bitcoin? And why is it worth anything? First, a little origin story. The Great Recession in 2008 led to millions of people losing their homes, jobs, and savings to the subprime mortgage crisis. This eroded the public's trust in traditional financial institutions and central banks. It was against this backdrop of disillusionment that Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, launched a revolutionary concept in 2008. A peer -to -peer digital currency that could function without central authorities like banks. This is made possible thanks to blockchain technology. A blockchain is simply a digital record book or ledger. All transactions are publicly broadcasted on the blockchain and each transaction is cryptographically linked to the one before it in a chain -like sequence, hence the term blockchain