[toby-]

Bitcoin wasn't anything extraordinarily revolutionary; it built upon others' work over decades of collaborative progress, and introduced few truly novel ideas. Very impressive work by all means, but it didn't require genius-level skill or knowledge.

[SilentM68]

Perhaps I am not as smart as I led myself to believe but the sound and words of the voice at the other end of the phone that called my then sff company job's tech support line (when IT jobs were more abundant) were way over my head.

With that being said, you are correct about "BTC being built upon others'" work over decades of collaborative progress, e.g. Hashcash (proof-of-work from 1997), B-money (1998), Bit Gold (1998), Adam Back's Hashcash, Wei Dai's b-money, Nick Szabo's Bit Gold, with the core tech involving public-key cryptography, Merkle trees, blockchain concept (from Haber/Stornetta 1991), etc. I used AI just to get a summary of previous tech BTC is based on.

Though I am a technical person, or at least that's what I tell myself, most of the above concepts and technology is beyond my reach. I would think somebody that knows that kind of stuff, either has a lot of time on their hands, has a lot of resources or has a lot of talented and technical friends.

But what do I know. I am just a "Brain Sturgeon" :)