Speaking from my own limited knowledge, the whole idea of btc is still a mystery to me till this day, with it's first Blockchain mining in 2009, it's amusing how this journey has gone thus far. In 2008 when traditional financial institution have low trust, the founder (Nakamoto Satoshi) came up with a way to carry out financial transactions not based on trust, that is to say, eliminating a trusted third party, thus coming up with a per-to-per kind of transaction based on proof-of-work so as to create a safe and secure transaction without the involvement of a third party.
It was initiated by many ideas, developments before 2008, with things called as "Bitcoin prehistory" that you need to learn about.Cryptography, Elliptic Curve, and more technical developments as well as some failed projects before we had Bitcoin in 2009.
Previously there are Digicash (1989), CyberCash (1994), E-Gold (1996), BitGold (1998), B-Money (1998), BitTorrent (2001).
Bitcoin prehistory. (Saylor Academy).
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It all started like a joke
It did not start as a joke, seriously man!