Bitcoin is a system that uses cryptography and computer science to create digital scarcity. It's not just scarce digits though, bitcoin is a system designed to keep everyone honest with economics and game theory. Since these digits are scarce and people consider them valuable, smart mathematicians and electrical engineers try to game the system by mining these digits with cheap energy and fast processors designed to solve the cryptography in bitcoin. Someone like myself who sees the value in a decentralized currency, wants to secure the "store of value" proposition of bitcoin by downloading a copy of the blockchain and confirm transactions, the "blockchain" is every transaction of every bitcoin ever moved. When I say "confirm transactions," this is the trusted third-party part of the system. Anyone can see their transaction live on the blockchain because that's the way bitcoin's protocol works. Since we all see every bitcoin in the system all the time, we can know we are using bitcoin and this distributed ledger creates the trusted third-party. No more Byzantine Generals problem, thank you Satoshi Nakamoto.

I think we lack the language to properly describe what all is going on in Bitcoin, so people get worked up with excitement in the possibilities. Truthfully after I started to learn more and more about bitcoin, my definition of value, money, and currency changed. 'Money' is now funny and not really based on anything, 'currency' is now value tied to something and 'value' is showing proof of work. Maybe currency was always that, but I never thought of it like that before bitcoin.

tldr: There isn't a simple explanation for bitcoin ...yet.