Thank you for your help, everyone! I feel like I kinda have a slightly better understanding of what bitcoin is now...sort of. I'm still confused about some particulars though.
Based on what's been shared about bitcoin being designed to increase in value over time through built-in shortages, it doesn't exactly sound like some populist rebellion against The Establishment like the bitcoin proponents here seem to be contending. If a currency is gaining value over time, that means a steadily decreasing share of the population has access to it over time, which means that it's designed to exclude most people and become affordable increasingly only to wealthier and wealthier people over time. The actual populists of old demanded just the opposite. They demanded the creation of "fiat currency", i.e. the replacement of the gold standard with the silver standard, and eventually paper money, so that they could afford to pay back their debts more easily by getting easier access to money. Bitcoin, by contrast, sounds to me more like rich people missing the exclusivity of the gold standard and rebelling against "fiat currency" to reassert something vaguely analogous thereto. By creating an increasingly scarce (scarce relative to population growth, that is) new currency that's designed to replace established national currencies that are subject to taxation and regulation by often democratically-elected governments, the hope seems to be to circumvent all remaining venues of democratic control over finance so that the capitalist class might avoid all remaining burden of social accountability altogether: all taxes and all responsibilities to the public. It sounds to me, in other words, like a thoroughly backward, reactionary, and deeply, deeply elitist concept.
What I'm still not understanding though are the core mechanics of it. I'm not a tech wizard. I'm just a 39-year-old grocery store clerk who dropped out of college. How exactly does one go about acquiring bitcoin, for example? Like in English? And exactly how is bitcoin "mined"? Like is there a computer somewhere that's calculating that whatever-it-is magic math equation that creates bitcoins automatically and that computational process is just popularly known as mining or something? Also...how again does this cause ecological damage? As best I can tell, bitcoin is just an idea, and one that doesn't have a physical form like paper money at that, and as such it's not actually being physically mined from the earth and extracted from trees. Just like...bitcoin is such a bad idea that it pains the Earth and metaphysically causes ecological damage? 
(I could almost believe that actually. It sounds a sufficiently terrible concept to me!)
