Bitcoin is simple the same way Git is simple. Appreciating it is less about understanding the technology and more about caring why the solution matters.
Git is just a way to deal with objects in a DAG (insert standard joke about homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space). Not super difficult. But unless you have worked in a horrible version-control system, you probably just don't care about having that capability, so when someone starts excitedly jumping up and down while showing you how easy it is to draw a line connecting two circles, you might figure you just aren't smart enough to get it.
Likewise, Bitcoin is a combination of recognizing a certain problem and exploiting a certain technology to solve it. If you understand that distributed, trustless consensus is a hard problem, and that digital signatures and proof-of-work algorithms combine in this exciting way to solve it, then Bitcoin makes perfect sense. But otherwise your inner voice keeps asking "why are we even discussing this?" and making you feel dumb.
Git is just a way to deal with objects in a DAG (insert standard joke about homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space). Not super difficult. But unless you have worked in a horrible version-control system, you probably just don't care about having that capability, so when someone starts excitedly jumping up and down while showing you how easy it is to draw a line connecting two circles, you might figure you just aren't smart enough to get it.
Likewise, Bitcoin is a combination of recognizing a certain problem and exploiting a certain technology to solve it. If you understand that distributed, trustless consensus is a hard problem, and that digital signatures and proof-of-work algorithms combine in this exciting way to solve it, then Bitcoin makes perfect sense. But otherwise your inner voice keeps asking "why are we even discussing this?" and making you feel dumb.