History of money can go far as human creation. While there were no physical fiat cash at the moment, people had to do commerce and transact with one another. Transactions occurred materially by swapping what was available for what was needed. Years go by and people started using bead, salts, rocks, shells and so on, as tender. They would use these things to show the value of their goods. These forms of tender for debt has to be durable, scarce, divisible, fungible, transportable, and recognizable. When commerce became a geographic thing and the need for a universal currency was needed, gold came into existence.
Gold came into existence 5000 years ago and since then, it has been the only true store of value, not until Bitcoin. Before bitcoin, a person cannot store $5000 in fiat for 150 years for children and expect to see that it has the same value, the value would have depreciated, so the only way to store this for a long period of time was to convert to gold, tell the next generation where to find it and then, they had would convert it at a valuable amount not affected by inflation. Gold was doing a good job in all, but left a few things out, such as transparency, decentralization, and ease of carriage from one place to another.
Bitcoin has proven to be better than gold consistently. It is scarce (21 million supply) compared to gold, it is very divisible (satoshi), Transportable, deflationary and transparent.
Currently, there isn't much liquidity in the market, but overtime, people and institution will be willing to invest in the cryptocurrency market. With a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, people can store value for years, without the fear of losing its value to inflation.