Bitcoin Forum

By taking a walk in my oldest threads, I wondered what part of Bitcoin was the most difficult, for me, to grasp. I think that I'm between the “Miners have a stronger voice than the rest of the users consensus-wise” argument and the block-size debate.

Right next to those, I'll easily put Elliptic Curve Cryptography and the Lightning Network as a concept. How about you?

Pretty much the technical stuff in general for me lol. I know enough to be able to discuss Bitcoin for hours and hours and hours on end, but definitely not enough(far from it) to have a meaningful conversation with a core developer.

As for when explaining Bitcoin to other people, it's the concept itself — the money or the asset itself that's actually not controlled by a central authority. And add the fact that the inventor is a mysterious anonymous online person, it makes it sound like a B-tier scifi/suspense film.

Great question. As mk4 said, I would be out of depth talking to anyone with an understanding of the code. This is something i ardently wish to pursue but the distractions in this space are unfortunately too many. From the lack of newbie focussed bitcoin development to the allure of finding that DeFi gem that can help me stack more sats, there are plenty of reasons that keep one occupied.

Conceptually, I think the hardest part to understand for me is the ECDSA and its implementation on the "finite field" with a "Generator point". There is just a lot of esoteric mathematics involved.

Other than that, I think most other concepts need a bit of in-depth research but the understanding without reading code is always going to be wanting. So, it is indeed one of my goals, to grok Bitcoin, the network, wallet and miner; although they can all even be the same.

mk4 hit it right on the head. The technical stuff is generally the most difficult part to understand.

However, for me, the actual math behind ECC is where my eyes start to cross. I have a strong understanding of the technicalities surrounding bitcoin, but when we start to get involved with cryptographic math, I experience a steep drop-off.

great insight to get to know where the hard to understand bitcoin is. I think getting to know more about Elliptic Curve Cryptography is difficult. I will still try to learn Elliptic Curve Cryptography, because the difficulty will be beautiful at times when we often learn and understand correctly.

I'm too much illiterate on the technical part, especially understanding the mining part as I have not ever checked out that how it works because I don't have any device or way to test it. So, it's something I really have no idea, especially how things work on the backend.
Anyway, I think it's not like everyone has to understand everything about bitcoin. Some may be technical experts while others only know the theory. Some may think having knowledge on how to secure your fund with bitcoin while some may only think receive/spend is enough.

From my personal experience, people have a hard time understanding the way Bitcoin works, in the context of transactions and mining - the question is always how this whole thing works and who controls it. When I tried to explain the whole concept to people, they mostly didn’t understand it, and if to some extent they did, they always wonder how it all works if there isn’t someone who manages everything.

Another thing that often confuses people is the possibility of double-spending, which exists as an option, although if you mention it people just become even more skeptical than before. The bottom line is that technical things are not exactly a topic that can be talked about with anyone, because people are just more confused and often conclude that it is too complicated.

I fully understand people who encounter Bitcoin for the first time, some just need time to process it all, and some just can't figure it all out - which is perfectly normal, because as in other comments, for me some technical things are just overcomplicated.

This can be different for anyone but for me hardest part of understanding, bitcoin is the technical part where you can understand the encryptions and the part where people understand the bitcoin source code, even if I'm a python developer and did some works in CPP I still cannot understand the source code and how exactly the project works, however that's not important for everyone to understand such things about bitcoin and if you understand the bitcoin fundamentals that would be enough.

Anything that involves mining and its technicalities. To be honest, I tried reading books about cryptocurrencies but the technicalities on the blocks, mining hashes, etc. seems to be out of this world as they have their own language.

I am completely amazed by people who comment and post threads under the Mining, Development & Technical Discussions board like they have their own language. They seem to understand completely the technicalities, technology, and process behind it. I tried understanding and reading books about it but it always left me baffled on the process.

I can't understand why Satoshi Nakamoto leaves the forum and everyone at a certain point!
Why did Satoshi believe Cyrus, Cobra, and theymos even they don't know each other!!
Though everyone is anonymous then why most of the forum members do not want to trust Cobra but they trust theymos!
overall, the creation of Bitcoin, the creator of Bitcoin, and people's trust in Bitcoin seem hardest to understand to me, very mysterious from the beginning!!

The hardest part to understand is how not to get sucked into taking up a mortgage on your house just to invest that money into BTC at its peak when everyone and their mothers are hearing about it, only to have multiple heart attacks the next week when it starts dipping. That's the hardest part, everything else is just semantics. I mean, the number of people that invest substantial amounts of their income and not understand the first thing, not about crypto, but in economics in general, is mind-boggling. And it seems it's about that time of the cycle to witness it all over again.

Well this one is part of reality but talking literally and not talking about other aspects or things attached to it then its a bit off on the discussions.

When we do talk about on the hardest then it would be mostly on technical aspects of Bitcoin from those code valuation and other stuffs in relation
to that on which majority of people who dont have knowledge about coding and programming stuffs would really not able to easily to understand
or wouldnt really able to grasp on.

But actually its not really needed to learn up this yet you could deal with Bitcoin without knowing these aspects.

My case is a bit different from what was mentioned by members. I don't have a hard time understanding any part of Bitcoin when I read/think about it separately (I have a good technical background). I understand very well how wallets work and how addresses and their private keys are generated, the process of creating and signing transactions, sending them to the network, including them in blocks and mining them. My problem is to put all of these together. When I take a step back and try to understand how everything works together, I feel like I don't understand anything.
Weird, right!

Before now I would have said Bitcoin trading is the hardest part of Bitcoin to understand but after I had has some tutorials and classes on personal trading, it's really not as complicated as I thought, right now, to me the hardest part of Bitcoin are the more technical areas, especially mining, even if I don't have the tools or power source to carry out Bitcoin mining, trying to just understand so far has proven nothing. and funny enough Bitcoin mining is one area I am really craving to understand.

The irony is that the Lightning Network was supposed to make things easier for people and also more user-friendly.. but I think it did the opposite. People are now more confused than ever and the adoption of the Lightning Network is slower than what was predicted.

The side-chains was a good idea, but the implementation and the tutorials for this was too technical for the average person to understand. It should be a 2 step process.. (Example : Download the wallet / Install App / Use the App) .. no constant tweaking.  ::)

LN was supposed to allow instant and cheap transactions, not simplify things that are already pretty complicated for the average Joe anyway. In order for someone to understand what LN is, they should first understand what Bitcoin is, and what do you think, how many people involved in Bitcoin in one way or another understand the difference between Bitcoin and blockchain?


I’m not an expert on LN, but the Phoenix wallet is often mentioned in the context of simplicity when it comes to saying that things with LN should be simpler. The experience of users who have used this wallet confirms this, although people find it difficult to accept the changes, especially at a time when on-chain fees are quite cheap.

Opinions on Phoenix Wallet? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5250677.0)

Being in crypto for years I am still not 100% confident on every aspect of Bitcoin. But the hardest thing which I am still learning is the mining part of Bitcoin. Though I know how it works in theory but still explaining its technical part to someone is very hard to me.

To be honest, there are too many to mention. When Bitcoin, for example, is described as a cryptocurrency, it simply means it uses cryptography. How, to be specific, I cannot sufficiently explain. And then somebody might ask which specific coding language Bitcoin is using. I might be able to answer but it is beyond my very little knowledge to explain further. When somebody talks of SHA-256, ECDSA, C++, and so on and so forth, my nose begins to bleed.

I thought old bitcoiners to have all the knowledge but I'm wrong. I see some of them are still missing a lot of things. I don't want to claim myself as an expert. I'm okay for technical part as an participant of the system. As mentioned above my post, I'm not a coder which forces me to not have a look at the coding part ever. So, I don't know that part at all.

For me, as a normal user of Bitcoin, nothing more especially if you know the basics, how to send Bitcoin, how the transaction or fees work, and different kinds of bitcoin wallet, or bitcoin wallet addresses.

But on the other hand, since I am also a developer. The development that involved codes is the hardest for me, like creating some app that is related to Bitcoin or connecting/integrating some app to Bitcoin.

Actually a lot. mostly about the technical things and the whole blockchain system and how is it built to create a peer to peer transaction system.
Till today i just used bitcoin to do the transaction and earn money from it but don't find out about it yet, later i will learn about the blockchain programming to learn about the fundamental how the system works.

Nothing much. I haven't learned much about how the technical stuff works but I reckon I can understand tidbits of it since I dabble in backend development and have had my own experiences with developing my own systems. The concept and idea of Bitcoin were pretty difficult for me to understand though when I first got to knowing crypto. I was pretty baffled with it since my first time hearing of it was when I was in Highschool, was pretty baffled with what crypto even meant since all I know with "cool" techy sounds was that they were used to hack something lmao. Years of being exposed made me gradually learn about it though.

Bitcoin's hardest part to understand is its price prediction. Any time it dip or pump. Only big traders can predict but it is just prediction. Bitcoin is expensive so anyone can't afford BTC for trade.

You can use a custodial wallet like BlueWallet if you don't want to bother with "constant tweaking". As the time goes by, wallets will become smarter thanks to features like autopilot, automatic inbound channels, splicing and so on. Also, The Lightning Network is an off-chain layer; not a side-chain.

Bitcoin development is a discussion that should not last longer with me if the topic requires coding which I am not clear about how it was generated or the language. The networks is not that complicated to me but teaching someone else about it may be very difficult to me.

Coding is definitely difficult if you're not technologically inclined which is pretty bad in this modern world where technology is everywhere, that's my problem too although I do understand a bit of it because I tried my hands on coding a long time ago.

The hardest thing for most people to understand seems to be the fact that Bitcoin is a hard asset, and that Bitcoin is the only crypto with this attribute. They seem to believe that if you can't kick it, or hold it, then it can't be a hard asset. Even the dictionary definition confines the definition to physical or tangible assets.

This is a really good question. I think what’s probably most difficult for the majority of people to understand would be the blockchain and it’s cryptographic process. I personally still don’t really know the finite details of how it all works and I think that’s the same for most people. Reading/understanding cryptography takes quite a bit of time and skill.

It’s not easy for everyone to understand how bitcoin works. I didn't even understand that in the very beginning. I thought that there is only one person who mines bitcoins and traders have to buy from him and then sell to other traders. It took time for me to find out what it is in reality.