Do You Really Know What Bitcoin Is? A Guide for the Confused.
“Secretly, you know you don’t understand the thing, even though you may pretend to. Isn’t it mostly for buying drugs? Where would I even buy one? Why would I want to? And isn’t it already too late to be asking these questions, let alone actually investing in it?”
"A bitcoin is one unit of an anonymous digital currency called, yes, bitcoin.
Hang on: “anonymous … digital … currency”?
That’s what it was built to be, at least — a theoretically untraceable and unhackable version of PayPal, more or less. But so many people got so excited about buying into the system that a market developed around buying and selling it — with bitcoin becoming less important as a currency than as a commodity, like gold. You can still buy things in bitcoin (like you can with gold, sort of), but many more people are now using it as an investment vehicle."
http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/12/what-is-bitcoin-a-guide-for-the-confused.html