If you've ever wondered why everyone's making such a fuss about Bitcoin, this is worth reading: Bitcoin isn't Money--It's the Internet of Money. Here's the money quote (no pun intended):

Bitcoin is a new transport layer for finance that allows decentralized, disruptive, permissionless development of applications on a separate layer. It has the capability to do for finance what the Internet did for communication.

People have a hard time understanding decentralized systems and they don't always get the power of a platform. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are both.